Show HN: Adless – Consumer-Friendly Monetization with Subscription Networks | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Adless – Consumer-Friendly Monetization with Subscription Networks

adless.net

6 pointsmgrund3 comments

Adless is like advertisement networks (e.g. Google AdSense), but for the subscription economy: We connect subscribers (instead of advertisers) with content creators without the need of a direct business relation between the two.

Simply put, Adless sells subscriptions which content creators can partake in by delivering content in accordance with the terms (e.g. without display advertisement or grant access to paywall’ed content, which are the initial subscription offerings). In return, content creators earn a share of the revenue (+ we take care of pretty much everything customer, sales and technology related for them).

Effectively, this is a "one subscription that works everywhere" value proposition for consumers, using collective bargaining power to keep the price reasonable.

The dream is to replace the de facto ads-based revenue model (with its dependency on tracking and privacy-invasion) with a sustainable privacy- and user-friendly revenue model that does not involve any dependencies on user profiling.

I’d love to hear your thoughts!

You’ll find some live demos at https://adless.net/get-started.

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Are you a content creator? Feel free to give Adless a try! The networks are currently (very) small, but we are working on bootstrapping them so any help in this area is much appreciated

It doesn’t matter if you made a blog, a game, a SaaS or something entirely different. The aim is to eventually cover all these customer types and more so we would love to have you onboard if you want to offer your content without display advertisement or provide access to otherwise-paid content (full eligibility criteria available when signing up as an earner). We compensate based on time spend on content so no need to be clever about triggering page view events.

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Hi HN!

  I’m Mathias, the founder of Adless.

A bit of additional info about Adless:

- Currently it’s just me and I’ve and bootstrapped Adless to this point over the last months.

- It’s not crypto. Adless is about finding a more consumer-friendly solution to the problem of Internet monetization, not experimenting with new technologies. My stance is that implementation details can change later if we find product-market fit and decide that a crypto-based solution offer an overall superior technology for the problem.

- Instead of focusing on privacy-by-technology, the focus is on achieving privacy-by-policy and ultimately privacy-by-business-model.

- I have long wanted to explore this problem because I hate how ads manipulate me (and in particular my child) but I also do not particularly enjoy what stand-alone subscriptions are doing in terms of accessibility of content (+ there is no chance I’m making that many subscriptions). And with concepts like “metaverse” being pushed, I think it is more urgent than ever to explore alternatives to ads (and generally data-dependent revenue models) as the primary way of financing the decentralized Internet.

- The typical subscription sales channel will be via content creator partners websites, so you will not find a strong consumer-focused sales channel directly on adless.net, although you can obviously subscribe from there.

Effectively, this is a "one subscription that works everywhere" value proposition for consumers, using collective bargaining power to keep the price reasonable.

The problem with focusing on money is that you're trying to convince users to go from "free, paid for with data" to "actually costs money, paid for with actual money", and that is never going to sound like a good deal to someone who doesn't really value either the content they see enough to support it or their privacy enough to avoid ad tracking.

In my opinion the only way for micro-payments and subscriptions to work will be if there's another reason to use them besides simply paying for content. Unlocking exclusive stuff is the obvious one, but I imagine there are others.

I absolutely agree, it is incredibly hard to get money out of consumers pockets.

For this very reason, a lot of bootstrapping efforts go into collaboration with players in niches where consumers do spend money historically, for example the classical news medias.

The "one subscription works everywhere" story in that case is access to a lot of medias all over the world with the same subscription so that the medias increase average visitor revenue and consumers don't have to tie themselves to one or two news sites they might accept to pay for, but instead can browse freely and automatically compensate each content creator as they do so. They basically get to compete on quality, not scale.

The issue with unlocking exclusive stuff is that everybody (even very large players) is struggling to put together enough "stuff" to justify a subscription by itself. This is basically the problem subscription networks solve by making content creators collaborate on adding stuff to the package.

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