CoinTent Works for a Sustainable Ad-Free Web
We caught up with CoinTent CEO Brad Ross to discuss how he is building a better web and sustainable company. Their recent Kickstarter campaign is generating $1,000+ per day. Support their work to get early access to their publisher friendly ad blocking chrome plugin, and other perks.
Why is now the time for your company to exist?
Users are fed up with the horrible experience of online ads. This has driven over 250 million people to use ad blockers every month. But, websites and publishers are struggling to make enough money to exist, especially when 20% of their traffic blocks ads (the average in the US). There needs to be a sustainable solution that gives both users a better experience but also websites a sustainable way to make money.
What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?
Our team met and worked together at Zynga. We love taking our learnings and experience in the mobile game world, growing games to hundreds of millions of users and finding sustainable ways to monetize games, and bringing it to the media world.
If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?
I think self-driving cars will be one of the most interesting and impactful changes to happen in the next few years. I also love the idea of eSports, so it’s possible I’d be doing something there!
At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your metrics?
We have two customer profiles, so we have a metric for each. One metric is the number of active monthly payers who are paying to support sites. The other is the amount of money we are able to deliver to websites.
In a few sentences, what do you offer to whom?
We offer consumers an ad-free web experience that supports the sites they love. It provides a faster, safer, and more private browsing experience, without crippling the sites that make great content. For websites, we offer a sustainable way for their users to remove ads across the web while still supporting the sites they love.
What’s most exciting about your traction to date?
Our ad-free product during our beta had a really high conversion rate immediately, which is part of the reason we got excited about doing this — we know there’s a huge need for it!
Where do you think your growth will be next year?
No clue. We have a few scenarios, but want to be in the hundreds of thousands of paying users.
Tell us about your first paying customer and revenue expectations over the next year.
Our first paying customer was a random software engineer who we still don’t know (though we reached out to him!). We are aiming to have hundreds of thousands of paying users by the end of next year.
What’s your biggest threat?
Our biggest threat is not getting critical mass. We depend on reaching enough users that the amount of money we can provide to websites is substantial.
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