We’re trying something different at Pickr starting from this week. You might begin to see us about town, because we want people to know Pickr is ad-free and proud of it.
In the age of being able to find anything and everything online, sometimes we’re unable to find exactly what we want. I liken it to something I learned about TV growing up in the US, where you could get 200 channels, but still find nothing to watch.
Hundreds of channels and only two were maybe worth watching, and typically they were the sort that ran without blatant and obvious advertising. There’s a message in there.
Do you remember the internet without ads? It was a while ago, truth be told, before people — advertisers and those running the ads — discovered there was money to be made from people using the internet
Now there’s an ad everywhere, and for some webpages, it’s blatant. Ads when you load. Ads every two paragraphs. Ads in between loads. Ads that you seemingly can’t escape from because ads are everywhere.
Back in August last year, we made a change: we turned ads off.
It came from being tired of ads, tired of the lack of due diligence advertising networks run, and tired of penalising readers with the burden of seeing ads. They clog up the reading experience without imparting a whole lot of anything useful.
The simple truth explaining just how many ads we’re all seeing is you need a lot of ads per page to generate a meaningful return, which explains why we’re all seeing so many lately.
So Pickr went the other way, and advertising was turned off. No ads, no affiliate links, no suggestions to buy anything specific.
No ads, no pop-ups, no bias. Yes please.
With that, we’ve decided to tell the world… or at least Australia.
Starting this week, we’re experimenting with outdoor advertising to let the world know about our ad-free experiment being more than an experiment. It is now a point of difference, something that seems impossible to find.
Australian ad-free tech news and reviews options
We checked, by the way. We searched and looked at pretty much every tech website found in the Australian landscape. Many of them are operated by people we know, because that’s what being a journalist of 18 years will do: you know everyone.
Australia is lucky to have such a vast tech publishing landscape, and only a handful get close to our vision of ad-free: WhistleOut’s Reviews.org Australia is staffed by one of the country’s best tech writing teams and has affiliate links for WhistleOut’s broadband plans, not to mention some neat little ad codes for services they may connect to; Alex Kidman’s AlexReviewsTech has an affiliate link or two in a block; Nick Broughall’s BTTR is largely ad-free save for the odd block, as well.
The few places that were entirely ad-free tended to miss the reviews part: TechDay lacks reviews, as does the ABC’s science and tech section, which mostly caters to science and offers virtually nothing in the way of technology reviews. Anthony Caruana’s Australian Apple News is the only tech website which gets close to Pickr’s vision of ad-free news and reviews, but focuses on what Apple-connected stories alone (Caruana is a former Macworld Australia editor, so this makes a lot of sense).
Pickr is different from much of what’s out there. It’s an award-winning ad-free Australian tech news and reviews site.
Our approach to being ad-free
Running a publication still costs something, so you might be wondering how Pickr makes money. Which is totally fair.
We have a pretty direct advertising approach which has no advertising at all, and instead have taken on something a little different. While readers can support, they’re not actually encouraged to.
Instead, we’re adopting a company support approach, encouraging companies who provide products to support the publication financially. No company is required to, and we’re quick to point out that regardless of whether a company does or doesn’t support Pickr, we will still write about the company and its products.
That’s ethical: Pickr covers everyone, provided there’s the time to do so. There are only so many hours in a day. Pickr is unbiased.
But the encouragement is there to get support from the suppliers of tech and the PR companies representing those suppliers because they also indirectly gain something from Pickr’s reporting. News and reviews can be construed as a form of indirect marketing, whether or not intended that way.
When PR and communications specialists reach out to journalists, they’re not doing the same job as the journalist. The news and reviews being written to Pickr may indirectly help that company, an area known in marketing as “earned media”.
It’s true that media can be earned, and you only need to look at Pickr’s “Recommended” year-round badges and “Best Picks” awards at the end of each year: these are free to run for tech companies, provided they’ve received one. Unlike some other awards which are paid for, Pickr badges are free to use. Again, that’s ethical. We don’t make money from a use of earned media badges.
But to help keep the lights on, we are asking these companies to consider helping the company with a small amount. They don’t have to, it’s just the right thing to do.
Getting the message out
Running ads is costing a little bit of money, and Pickr isn’t asking for support here. It’s another test, another experiment to get a message out.
Pickr does reasonably well in search, enough to say that plenty of people know the publication exists and will try it out, but we want ad-free tech to resonate with more people. It should.
You shouldn’t need to survive through a mountain of ads just to get a message that matters. You already have too much to deal with as it is.
So if you see one of Pickr’s outdoor ads around town, please let us know. Snap a picture and send word, either by email or social on Bluesky. Let us know the ads are making a difference, and if they gave you a chuckle. They’re intended to make you blink, and remember a world without ads, which is what Pickr is trying to create.
