New Scroll subscription service removes ads from over 300 news sites

guest · Jan 29, 2020

New Scroll subscription service removes ads from over 300 news sites
January 28, 2020
https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/...over-300-news-sites-including-android-police/

A new subscription service called Scroll launches today, offering advertisement-free access to over 300 sites, including The Atlantic, BuzzFeed News, Gizmodo, The Verge, and even us: Android Police. Eventually, it will run you $5 a month, but you can try it out for the next thirty days for free, and those that sign up early get a 50% discount on their first six months of service.

News-serving sites can't exist without a means to make money, but it can be tough balancing advertisements in a way that keeps readers happy.
Several concepts like Google's Contributors and the Basic Attention Token have tried to solve the problem with different approaches, but they've been a bit tedious for your average user to manage, and not very many sites have accepted them.

Scroll is a bit simpler: It's a single subscription service with one monthly fee and 336 participating sites (at the time of writing), with 70% of the money you pay going to the sites you visit. In the words of CEO Tony Haile, "It’s a future where users don’t get pissed off and journalists don’t get laid off."
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The company's payment model is simple for customers, but it is a bit more complicated for publishers. That fee gets divided up per-user based on their individual "engagement and loyalty," according to an interview granted to TechCrunch.
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Scroll: Scroll launches a better internet for everyone

TechCrunch: Scroll launches its subscription offering ad-free access across 300 partner sites

CEO Tony Haile previously led analytics company Chartbeat, and he said he founded Scroll because of his frustration with the way news sites were becoming dragged down by ads and trackers — and despite those performance-slowing/privacy-defying practices, publications were still struggling to make money.

“Basically, we were trying to think through: How would the internet have evolved if it didn’t have to rely on ads [from the start]?,” Haile said. “What would the economics look like?”
The solution that he and his team came up with is a subscription where consumers pay (the price is starting at $2.49 per month for the first six months after launch, then goes up to $4.99 per month) for “a web that’s twice as fast, with no shadowy trackers, no ads, no pre-rolls.”
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guest · Oct 5, 2021

Scroll is shutting down in ‘approximately’ 30 days to become part of Twitter Blue
Scroll won’t be available as an independent service anymore
October 5, 2021
https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/5/...andalone-subscription-ad-free-article-service

Scroll’s ad-free subscription web service is shutting down as an independent entity in “approximately” 30 days, the company announced in an email to subscribers. The service — which was purchased by Twitter earlier this year — will instead be rolled into the burgeoning Twitter Blue premium subscription as “Ad-Free Articles.”

In its current form, Scroll is a $5-per-month service that offers ad-free browsing to hundreds of websites, including The Atlantic, BuzzFeed News, G/O Media, USA Today, and Vox Media — which, full disclosure, includes The Verge. It works by using a combination of third-party cookies and browser extensions to stop websites from showing ads to paid subscribers.
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Twitter Blue currently offers a variety of bonus features for the service, including an “undo send” feature for quickly retracting your tweets, a bookmarks folder for grouping and saving tweets, and a reader mode that converts long threads into a single, cohesive block of text.

There’s not a lot of details in Scroll and Twitter’s announcement of what the changeover will look like, practically speaking.
Also absent from the news is any information on price and availability. One of the selling points for Scroll was that its $5-per-month fee would go (at least in part) towards funding the journalism that subscribers read: Scroll kept $1.50, while the other $3.50 per month was divvied up amongst sites based primarily on how much a reader was reading them.
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Twitter: Introducing Twitter Blue - Twitter’s first-ever subscription offering

Starting today, we will be rolling out our first iteration of Twitter Blue in Australia and Canada. Our hope with this initial phase is to gain a deeper understanding of what will make your Twitter experience more customized, more expressive, and generally speaking more .
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New Scroll subscription service removes ads from over 300 news sites

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