Advertisements rule the internet and now Mozilla is arguing that the online advertisement ecosystem is broken. The non-profit company says that the majority of the revenue generated from advertisements is landing in the pockets of a handful of companies while other publishers are not benefiting from it.
On similar lines, Mozilla has today teased a new service under which it will offer advertisement-free internet at a monthly subscription service. The page says, “Sign up now! $4.99 per month” but clicking on it leads to a survey as Mozilla wants to analyze the user’s response before launching the service.
This ad-free internet service is specially intended for websites that use a paywall to restrict users from accessing content for free up to a limit. Mozilla is most likely to launch this service in partnership with Scroll, an ad-free news service aggregating news from popular news websites like Vox, BuzzFeed, The Atlantic, and USA Today.
As per Mozilla’s webpage, its ad-free subscription-based service will include audio versions of articles, top recommended reads and syncing of bookmarks across devices. The mode will work on desktop as well as mobile.
This isn’t the first of its kind initiatives, as Google also launched a similar version of the advertisement-free internet under “Subscribe with Google” program. It allowed users to sign in to a host of major publishers with a single Google account. But the service did not receive much response from users.
It remains to be seen how Mozilla’s initiative will be treated by users and will it pose a challenge to ad-blockers that perform the same task for free.
