Google Contributor - A glimpse of a changing digital ad landscape?

If you want to achieve any marketing aim then biddable is a great way to boost our activity however, biddable is difficult to get right. If you want to get some solid advice on how to do it right, then read our blog on "Biddable media can accelerate any inbound marketing campaign"

I'll be honest, when I first heard about Google Contributor, I assumed it was a Kickstarter-like-project inline with Google Ventures. But it's not. It's not even close.

Google Contributor is a Google experiment - for want of a better term - to determine if web users would like to directly contribute to the sites they visit in exchange for seeing less ads. Simple.

While the service is all well and good, that's not the interesting part. What Google Contributor signals is a changing consideration of the biddable media landscape. Not just by the big providers like Google but also the end users. There is a rising trend for consumers using ad-blockers and providers such as Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Twitter moving to a consent-like approach, even Apple's latest OS, iOS9 now allows the integration of in-app ad blocking. Ad blockers have been around for a very long time (digitally speaking), but now they seem to be taking hold.

While Contributor currently only effects those sites using Google AdSense integrations, it does make for an interesting experiment. Would consumers rather pay for the sites they deem worthy, or would they rather the unsolicited ads we've all become accustomed to seeing? My gut says, 90% of users would rather the "free internet" in exchange for some eyeball real estate.

Sites like Facebook and Twitter are reliant on the revenues they make from targeted advertising which allows them to make the service free. No users, no advertising worth. But if there is a digital slide away from interruptive advertising, will the user then incur costs in other ways? Will Twitter start making you pay subscription charges? App.Net tried that and the model didn't last very long.

And, what about Google - Right now, Contributor only effects display advertising. But what about Search? Will that ever be blocked? Google has been placing relevance to the user as a central column of importance for years - but perhaps not if it starts to cannibalise their earnings.

Will YouTube move to a premium, ad free service? I'd probably pay for that.

But still, like we said, it makes for some interesting thinking.