Ad blockers are hugely popular. Close to 800mm people around the world use them to avoid intrusive ads and data collection. I do not use an ad-blocker but I completely understand why one would choose to do so.
And yet much of the media business is supported by advertising. There are a growing number of subscription-based media services, but many people cannot or won’t pay for content and the vast majority of content consumed on the web is advertising supported.
So USV has long felt that a subscription-based ad blocker would make a lot of sense. Ad-supported publications could opt-in to get a piece of the subscription revenue and agree to block ads to the subscribers who have the ad blocker.
And that is why we invested in our portfolio company Scroll which makes exactly that.
And today, Scroll and Firefox are launching Firefox Better Web, which is a service inside of Firefox ($2.50 a month to start and $5 a month in time).
I downloaded the latest version of Firefox this morning and signed up. It went like this:
I signed up by giving my email address and entering my payment credentials.
And then I added the Scroll browser extension and was good to go.
I visited SB Nation and got an ad-free experience.
Which compares to this experience in my Chrome browser without Scroll (Scroll works on Chrome too)
The partnership between Firefox and Scroll makes a ton of sense. Firefox has long been committed to privacy and making the web work better for its users. If you use Firefox try the Better Web service. And if you use Chrome or another browser, you can get Scroll and experience more or less the same thing there too.
