You're pitching it to potential customers entirely the wrong way.<p>Most consumers of web content (>99%) don't care about this in any way. I mean, to be perfectly honest, I'm only mildly interested in exploring alternatives to the ad-supported web. I almost never see ads anyway.<p>You should be selling this as something that will give access to paywall content. That's it. Because that's the only possible thing that there is even a sliver of a market for. Recruit content providers (the bigger, the better), figure out how much they are currently making off paywall revenue, possibly sell at a loss to build a user base (and demonstrate traction to more content providers and possible investors).<p>Once you have a user base and demonstrated traction, allow future content providers (of any size and viewership) to join your "platform" and earn payouts based on viewership. Obviously, still target large, valuable content providers directly.<p>As the number of content providers grows, your value proposition grows.<p>As it is, you're charging $10/month for a service that offers less value than what most people get for free through AdBlock.<p>The real economics experiment is if people will pay more money for less value. The utility of "fixing the web" doesn't even come close to spanning the value deficit.
The problem here (as I see it), is consumers don't care about this problem - and thats who you need to buy in. If ad-block already works for them, why download + pay for something else (that doesn't block ads anyway)?
To me this seems like it would suffer from a chicken and egg sort of issue. To expand, this is useful to me as a consumer if I could install it and browse the web ad and guilt free, as well as having access to pay-walled content with my Atri subscription essentially paying for it. As a content provider, I'm only going to want to provide this avenue of "subscription" if it nets more money than my current method of monetization of my content. By the looks of it, this is trying to recruit users first, but what value is a user being provided for the $30 over 3 months other than being included in an artificially limited experiment?<p>edit: To be clear, I like the idea, and I think something needs to be tried in order for something to work. These are just my initial skeptical criticisms.
Paymail.net is a competitor in this space. Our app doesn't need a chrome extension. We're all for shaking up the economics of the web. You can see a demo of the app here: signal.city/sigcity.mp4<p>One of the things I think publishers probably want with stuff like this is an open standard for letting people hop over paywalls.<p>We'd be happy to cooperate with Atri or Blendle or anyone else on this. I think if companies give up on the fantasy of owning the entire distribution channel there is still a ton of other ways to build products that add massive value in this market.
There's a lot more info on this page for some reason: <a href="http://www.fairtread.com/company/about/faq" rel="nofollow">http://www.fairtread.com/company/about/faq</a>
I'd put "HOW DOES THE "EXPERIMENT" WORK?" higher up. I shouldn't have to scroll down to find out what atri is. I think an evocative explanatory one-liner should be above the fold.
Flattr has been trying this since 2010. It got a lot of attention back then and is still used today.<p><a href="https://flattr.com/" rel="nofollow">https://flattr.com/</a>