Little Green Footballs is making an interesting offer to its online community: Pay $10 a month as a subscriber, and you’ll get to visit a cleaner, faster, ad-free version of the blog:
This isn’t just a cosmetic improvement; to display those ads from Google Adsense and Amazon, we have to make several calls to external web servers, which take quite a bit of time. And if those servers are slow or offline, it can cause the entire LGF page to load more slowly or even time out on rare occasions.
When you view our site with advertisements turned off, every page loads more quickly; it’s a very noticeable speed boost. (And as the designer of this mess, I have to say it looks a lot nicer too without the visual clutter.)
So, for the very low price of about 33 cents a day (less than the cheapest cup of Starbucks coffee), you can read LGF without the ads, at super-charged speed.
Maybe newspaper websites, which are often bogged down with ads, could benefit from this kind of revenue model. If outright paywalls don’t work, give loyal readers a chance to pay for a premium service. Would you pay good money for the luxury of an ad-free newspaper website?
Related: How to research a property’s history using Bexar County’s free records search
I think I just might.
(Photo credit: Pink Ponk)
