Google Contributor

Good to see. Basically, its like paying not to see ads.

Finally! What took them so long? And why didn't they acquire an existing vendor (for cheap)?

At the risk of being an unpopular opinion, advertising has been a huge boon in the growth of the Internet.

I dislike the ad crazy "news" sites that bombard you and destroy the entire user-experience, but I would equate a not-too-intrusive advertisement as being not an obnoxious thing, and something that allows you to get something, not totally for free, but at the cost of a second of your attention. I'm sure popular ad-supported sites would be not so popular if suddenly put behind paywalls. Much much less seen.

About donations, I would look to the experience of those disappointed folks who hoped to recoup some costs waiting for donations. Also, I would equate begging for donations and ads. I love wikipedia for instance but the donation begging can be just as obnoxious as intrusive ads.

While a good step, personally my reasons for blocking ads rests more from a tracking standpoint than visually.

Google being a middleman makes it logistically easy but removes the main reason why I would pay some amount directly to sites themselves.

Ideally, something like this could still contribute to the sites visited while the user has an adblocker enabled or JavaScript disabled. I would be quite happy to chip in to help sites display fewer ads, but it would be tedious to whitelist all of the participants just so they can get their contribution from my visit. In principle I am very interested in consciously supporting those who create the content I get completely for free (since I don't even view the ads), but for it to work for me it would need to be very low-hassle.