Google has worked in the past year on a feature that would have allowed the public to make small voluntary donations to websites favorites while browsing, a sort of one-off "tip". The Mountian View giant has however decided to abandon the idea in favor of other initiatives.
It is the TechCrunch website that illustrates the Google project, publishing some images created in the design phase and which portray how big G had functionality in mind. The tool would work via Google Payment, allowing readers to make occasional donations between $ 0.25 and $ 5 via an overlay button at the bottom of the screen, with the aim of supporting independent publishers, bloggers and musicians.
Google then decided not to continue with the project, although the tool could have made it possible to generate a small source of income for those websites often in difficulty. The Mountain View giant, after confirming the veracity of the circulated images and the actual project development work, said: "We recognize that there is no single business model that is able to work for each publisher and we think it is It is essential to explore new technologies that can help publishers to monetize better. Funding Choices is an example of a product in which we have invested significantly and which we will continue to evolve to support publishers and their monetization strategies. "
Google's idea of tipping websites. Source: TechCrunch
Google has long been involved in monetization solutions and strategies for publishers, but still has not managed to find a model capable of working stably in the long term. Google One Pass, which allowed users to subscribe to paywalled websites, was launched in 2011 but withdrawn within a year while in 2014 Google Contributor was proposed to remove advertisements on partner sites against a monthly payment, then closed in 2016 and proposed again in 2017 and still in use by some publishers. Then in 2018 there was the launch of Subscribe with Google which has garnered some success but which has yet to spread significantly.
However, these are initiatives that require a sort of commitment that a simple occasional user may not want to take on: even just the idea of spending a sum, however small, every month for a service that is used "intermittently" could be enough to discourage the use of the service. Here because some form of one-off payments, like the "tip" tool Google was working on may have better results.
Clearly nothing prevents individual websites from independently creating such a tool, but Google's credibility would have given more weight to the thing. Having said that, the Mountain View company did not however rule out the possibility of introducing such an instrument in the future, e it could therefore be a road that Google still intends to explore.
