This is Signal vs. Noise, a weblog by 37signals about design, business, experience, simplicity, the web, culture, and more. Established 1999 in Chicago. Follow us on Twitter for more information on our products.

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Weird ;)

Great post.

You can also use the print view on a lot of websites to eliminate most of the distractions. (http://www.ellisbenus.com/ellis-benus/how-to-read-online-without-distraction/)

This is really awesome! Not only the idea but also how it’s implemented.

@Ellis: I’ve been using the print view so far whenever possible but even that is hard to find on a lot of sites. This is one click.

You think those are bad? Local newspaper is ad crazy! http://tinyurl.com/7ms36 Where’s the content?

“It seems doubtful that visual punishment of your customers is a sustainable business model.”

Does it? Glossy magazines have swollen to hundreds of pages just by cramming ads in. An imperfect analogy, sure, but what’s to stop it happening here?

With such massively increased popularity, I don’t know that big-box Web producers like CNN would ever really work hard to find business models that please the fraction of their users that hold these kinds of ideals so dear.

CNN .com claims 39 million unique users per month for itself, on average. What percentage of those use (or will ever use) Readability? What percentage will be deterred from visiting by ads, if CNN stays within what people perceive as industry norms (however they may shift)?

Ad-funded means accessible to mass market. Accessiblity to all - you might think some dull populist sentiment - is one important aspect of the “public good” mission of most news media web sites. Journalism without readers is an awfully elitist exercise. Ideally, smaller niches of folks who want an ad-free experience (myself included) ought to be willing to pay for such party-to-party or through a system of media logging—should this prove sustainable.

Why couldn’t good content fund it’s self?

@Brian Hayes: because content is easily consumed but can be expensive/time consuming to produce? Who will want to pay someone to keep posting good content, when all the traffic brought to the site is not being pitched a product of sorts?

I don’t know about it in the long term, but Google is doing pretty well as a master of serving up ads.

Readability type bookmarklets will never take off. It’s too much of an extra step for most people. There have always been banner ad removing browser tools, they’ve never been popular with ‘regular’ people (non techies).

Eventually we’ll get to a time when content will be profitable.

Clean design, without ads that interrupt, will be part of the profitable content world.

Product placement is the advertising solution to ineffective banner ads.

That article about Blockbuster flailing could be an advert for one of those indie rental shops.

We already see this on TV; seemingly news-worthy stories are actually 90-second commercials sold to the station and presented by local news casters.

“It seems doubtful that visual punishment of your customers is a sustainable business model”

This business model has been effective for print for a very long time. Have you ever picked up a magazine in the grocery store checkout line? Some may view this as painful, but what’s happening online is nothing new.

I’m with Devan and rick. Tools like Readability and Instapaper will only ever be used by a fraction of a percent of web users and couldn’t and shouldn’t even be on content provider’s radars. Having said that, I love me some Instapaper (esp. the iPhone app) and the Readability bookmarklet.

How would 37signals feel about a substantial percentage of their audience using Readability on /svn, leading to greatly reduced The Deck views (and, presumably reduced payment from The Deck).

Any thoughts on whether micropayments will ever be viable?

I doubt I’m the only one that’s talented enough to ignore ads while reading articles these days. I’m never in favor of any of these tools that strip out advertising. It’s how sites make their money, which in turn funds the content.

Let’s hope that Readability and Twitter never clash. Readability all but wipes clean any and all text content from Twitter.

Of course Twitter hasn’t figured out to monetize content either, so I guess it doesn’t matter.

I find audio interrupts to be more of an imposition than visual ones (at least, the ones that don’t jump on top of the actual content).

My default is to have my speakers turned off, but to turn them on for specific YouTube visits (for example).

I would like a browser plug-in that would mute all web pages (at first) and then learn from the crowd which websites have annoying audio and which have beneficial audio (youTube, etc).

The Nuke Anything extension for FF has a “Remove Everything Else” option which is perfect for this and really easy to use.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/951

As long as there isn’t crazy sound, pop-over ads, or whatever, I’d much rather read that original version than the dry, image free version. There’s a lot to be said for format. That “readable” content is so dry and unstyled. Now, if it could summarize the content, that would be notable.

The response to this sort of thing? Editorial standards will crumble, you’ll get links directly in the text, product placement, nonsense like that. So, thanks everyone for your ad blockers, etc, because it will make standards even worse.

I think there’s room for non-traditional advertising to step in and fund great content. Advertising that is willing to become a part of what they’re funding – getting involved, interacting with users. Being something more than just an annoying flashy ad on the screen – giving users something they want.

It’s worth noting that Readability does not automatically strip ads. It still requires an action from the user to enable the view. Many people use the print view today to make all that clutter go away.

-Rich Arc90

Readibility is nice, but not perfect. It doesn’t work always and only displays the article text.

Additional info such as notes, comments, links etc. are often removed.

Tried it on this page, are here are the results:

If anything this just shows me that the web really should be presented more as a billboard, than an online magazine.

There is a fine line between enticing and overwhelming, a darn shame so many in this industry have no fucking clue what the difference is.

Cheers for the link mate

If you don’t want to view the ads that fund the free content on a website, then the ethical thing to do is to stop visiting the website, rather than using an application or service to strip the ads, effectively stealing the content.

While I’m not a big fan of ads, I understand that that viewing them is my “payment” for access to the “free content.”

I do like the option of paying a “fremium” model, with free with ads and ad-free with payment, model. Salon offers this, and I pay annually to view salon.com without ads.

@David And I suppose you never change the channel when there are ads on TV? Because, after all, they’re the channel’s main revenue source and it’s only ethical that you sit down and watch them? And when you read a paper magazine you look carefully at each and every ad, instead of skipping those pages as fast as possible? It’s the same thing, you know. Digital technology just makes content (much) easier to create and access, it doesn’t change its nature.

readability is pretty cool.

but i’d prefer if all the ads and stuff were just “muted out” to a faint grey, and would return to color on a hover.

-bowerbird

I’m always surprised to see what websites actually look like when I’m working at someone else’s computer without an ad blocker.

I must admit I don’t care about how companies fund their content. If it’s a smaller site (and no animation), I’m not blocking it. Otherwise it’s on my black list.

Speaking of by-product (an earlier post)... This is a great web / content development tool. I just used it to pull my own content off the web page and in to Readability. Without my own graphics / layout in the way, I was able to spot a couple of grammar errors that I might not have noticed had I just looked over them inside my own style sheet. I can see using readability more for this reason rather than reading news stories.

@David – Remember this tool works where you go to a web page first (so you already have looked at the ads and have the opportunity to click if you choose, supporting the content) and then click on Readability which strips away the ads and gives you the option to reload the page back to it’s original form. It also strips away links to other areas as well, so you would be unable to browse a site in the Readability tool alone. For these reasons, I do not view this as a form of stealing the content.

firefox add-ons: *erase most ads: adblock plus *ignore time wasting sites: leechblock

Someone asked whether micropayments will ever be viable… the answer is yes, there’s a great system for it. Sadly, whenever I post about it in the comments section of articles like this, people think I’m a spam-bot. :(

Matt, you may want to try TidyRead. It has accuracy to extract articles and supports different languages.

Is it just me or does this plugin rip out everything except the article. The ads are only a small amount of the visual clutter removed from this page.

The point is exaggerated by removing navigation, and other-content on this page. This is tabloid-like to me. A cheap way of making 37signals point of charging for things online.

I agree with charging, but I think this article is misleading.