Mozilla is reportedly working on a new service which would allow users to pay minimum fees to access websites. To bring this into reality, Mozilla is partnering up with Scroll which offers ad-free reading experience on popular news sites such as The Verge, Buzzfeed, Gizmodo, etc. Mozilla is currently testing their new platform which carries the motto, “support the sites you love, avoid the ads you hate”.
This isn’t a new idea but a particular take on to one of many challenges that companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple are attempting to crack in various ways and in Mozilla’s case, the main proposition here is to offer users no ads on news sites that don’t strictly require subscriptions.
Using Firefox as the platform, Mozilla said it would begin inviting users at random via browser notifications to participate in surveys about new products. Scroll was one of the first partners in this Firefox program.
“By enabling more direct funding of publishers, Scroll’s model may offer a compelling alternative in the ecosystem. We will be collaborating with Scroll to better understand consumer attitudes and interest towards an ad-free experience on the web as part of an alternative funding model,” Mozilla said at the time.
Even Google launched its subscription service last year , called Subscribe with Google, which allows users to sign in to multiple major publishers with a single Google account.
The service is to be priced at $4.99 (approximately Rs. 346) per month and has been implemented in partnership with a service called Scroll. The money will then be channeled towards publishers, giving them an alternative source of revenue.
The participating companies will be receiving subscription money instead of advertising revenue. How the subscription money is split up is unclear and there is no information on Scroll’s website about how the money is being divided among the participating companies
Subscribers will also be getting a handful of other benefits besides supporting sites and accessing these sites without seeing any advertisement: from a seamless experience between mobile and desktop devices to audio versions of articles, and a special app that highlights new content without advertising.