For several dollars a month, a new service is offering the opportunity to remove ads from your news reading experience and still support the journalists who create the content, USAToday reports.
Scroll – a start-up whose investors include USAToday owner Gannett, the New York Times and Samsung – debuted its ad-avoiding news service on Tuesday.
Co-founded by Tony Haile, the founding CEO of online metrics tracker Chartbeat, Scroll costs $4.99 per month after an introductory rate of $2.49 per month for the first six months. It works with more than 300 sites, and more are being added.
Media analyst Ken Doctor once called it "an iTunes for news."
When a subscriber is logged into Scroll, they won't see ads of any kind when they visit participating websites on any browser on their phone, tablet or computer.
Scroll keeps 30% of the subscription fee and distributes the other 70% to the participating sites based on which articles users visit.
"Your money is only distributed to the sites you go to and love," Haile said. Scroll's model will provide news sites with substantially more revenue per view than they would otherwise receive from digital ads, he said.
The idea came from a desire to help identify a sustainable business model to support journalism while removing the digital clutter that can annoy readers.
To be sure, the $4.99 fee doesn't get you a subscription to sites with a paywall. But if that paywall allows a metered number of free clicks before payment is required to see more, you won't see any ads on those initial free stories. And if you do have a subscription to the news site, you'll have the extra benefit of no ads.
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