Contenture – The anti-ad network
If you want to make money from a blog you have a limited number of options. The most popular approach is to run ads – typically using an ad network like Google’s AdSense. Many bloggers also join affiliate programs and post links and banners for those programs – but to the visitor it is just more ads. You can also charge a subscription fee – but you will have to have some truly unique content to pull that off and also the systems to handle the ecommerce. So your primary options are to run ads and annoy your visitors or collect money from and annoy your visitors.
Next week, Contenture is launching what they call the “anti-ad network.” The basic idea is that you would add a subscription component to your blog/website. You would offer some type of premium benefits to visitors who are signed up with Contenture. Those benefits could be priority access to new content, exclusive access to your archives, special commenting privileges, and/or an ad-free experience.
The twist to the subscription model is that the consumer only has to sign up with Contenture – not with dozens of individual blogs and websites. Contenture plans to sign up bunches of sites to this model and users pay one flat monthly fee to have access to the premium services of all of these sites. Every time a Contenture user visits your web site, you make money. You are paid a piece of every visitor’s monthly payment. The amount will be based on how many visits they made to your site divided by the total number of visits they made to all Contenture sites.
Installation for the web site will be simple. Paste some Javascript code into your site, and then configure the premium services and content controls, if you choose. The setup doesn’t sound any harder than setting up affiliate links or AdSense.
The convenience, for both visitors and web site owners, is that there is only one sign up. I can sign up one time with Contenture, but in any given month my $5.99 might be paid out to 5, 10 or even a 100 websites. It might only be pennies to each site, but for many folks AdSense is in the same ballpark on a per visitor basis. If Contenture gets a volume of users it becomes interesting.
The challenge, like any network, is you to need to get a critical mass to sign up into the Contenture network. Contenture is the team behind Clicky real time web analytics so they have an immediate base of over 100,000 web sites that they can market too. They will pay websites $1 for every new paying user who signs up so all the member sites will have the incentive to advertise Contenture.
Contenture is launching what they call the Micropayment Revolution” on Tuesday, May 26. So far no big names announced – but if they could land a social media site or two, Contenture could get interesting very quickly. Without a big name – it is going to be hard to get the Contenture ball rolling.
Written by David Silversmith from Info MusingPosted on May 19th, 2009 and filed under Making Money
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8 Responses to “Contenture – The anti-ad network”
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Contenture – Support the sites you love…
Contenture reverses the classical online advertising model by offering users ad-free sites and enabling webmaster to build Freemium content business models. Very interesting launch – I just registered.
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Regular model – readers see everything and ads.
Contenture – readers see less unless they pay.
I fail to see how readers will be more happy about latter.
Micropayment idea is around for years but I don’t remember anyone actually made it work online (may be mistaken on this one).
Rarst – with Contenture, sites have the option to restrict access to content, but we’re not expecting this to be a heavily used feature as we agree, it would make some people mad. Contenture is more about supporting the sites you visit on a regular basis, and those sites being able to reward you for that by access to some exclusive content, or turning off ads. What each site does is ultimately up to that site.
Rarst – As far as I know, you are correct and micropayments is still a struggling (to be kind) idea.
That’s what seems interesting with Contenture – the idea that you make one payment and it is disbursed to all the sites you visit that use contenture.
So you make one “mini” payment of 6 bucks and Contenture than makes all the micropayments.
A key to me is that unless content sites find some revenue source you are going to see more and more of the better sites fading away. Servers, and Software, and writers don’t all come free.
@Sean
Supporting sites is around for ages and looks like donate button.
Went over docs on site. Seems interesting but PayPal payouts only is deal killer for me.
Story of my life online.
Rarst, thanks for your feedback. Paypal is about convenience for us more than anything else, as we can basically use an API to send out payments automatically.
Major publishers can apply to be paid via paper check also.
We’ll likely be adding other payment options based on feedback. How would you prefer to get paid?
@Sean
I know PayPal is convenient for publishers and many don’t bother beyond that. Still go and look at their countries list – there are over hundred of those were PayPal doesn’t allow to receive payments.
And believe me it sucks to be in that list of you want to sign up for advertising network or whatever.
Probably only payment option to me from western company is check. There is also Western Union. Google had added it to AdSense but not for my country at moment. Don’t know if it is Google or Western Union limitation.
Good luck with your project! I hope you’ll get to less convenient for you and more convenient for me payment options some time in the future.
@Sean,
I think it’d be great to allow users to *fund* their accounts from Paypal.
Currently, it looks like credit cards are the only option. And that initial CC signup screen is a bit of a hurdle.