Marco Arment: Ads
Would you pay $5 per month to remove every Google ad across all of their services and the content network (other sites displaying Google ads)?
Google ads are not annoying and are sometimes useful.
Does your answer change if, instead of Google, it’s $2 per month to remove ads on your favorite indie blog or service? What if it’s messaged as a premium “supporter” subscription that makes you feel good about supporting your favorite blog, and it happens to remove the ads as well?
I like supporting great things. However, removing ads is not an enticing deal to me since I hardly see any normally. I paid once for Reeder and Instapaper and the only ads I see in my whole reading 'workflow' are sponsored items in the Daring Fireball feed.
For a website or service to be worth paying for, what I really want is a superior experience. Removing ads is a part of that if the ads are bringing the experience down by being distracting or making the page cluttered. This is not the case for Google text ads. The trouble for news and opinion websites is that Reeder and Instapaper already provide a better experience than any website I have found.