I used to work at a startup that was trying to replace ads as the funding source for news (we failed, obviously) but the crazy thing we discovered is that the people who run news websites mostly don’t know where their ads are coming from, have forgotten how the ad system was installed in the first place, and cannot turn them off if they try we actually shipped a server-side ad blocker, for a parter who had so complet…
When I ran Android Police, we were one of the largest Scroll users in the beginning and I was pretty upset when Scroll shut down.
However, it never amounted to any meaningful revenue and was just a nice way to implement ad-free subscriptions across various sites. Other big sites used it too, like The Verge and Gizmodo and I thought it had some potential.