What’s the best way to skip ads online? Good question. As you may know, SkipIt is an online service that gives consumers the choice to skip video ads online.  It benefits digital publishers by paying them NOT to play a video ad, and benefits advertisers that don’t pay for skipped ads.  Consumers skip only when they want to, and can either use the free skips they earn or pay a small amount when they encounter the SkipIt invite.

For those of you into skipping video ads online, we wanted to explain how SkipIt is different than software extensions designed to block online ads.   Adblock and Adblock Plus are extensions that can be installed in either Firefox or Chrome web browsers to filter content and block ads.  Sounds great at first, but here’s how Adblock stacks up against SkipIt:

• Adblock and Adblock Plus are free to download and install, but they still cost you time.  With Adblock, for example, you still have to stare at a black box on your screen where the video ad would have run ( which still takes 15-60 seconds of your time)
• Adblock filters can occasionally block the actual content, not just ads
• You have to manually manage your Adblock filters and subscriptions to sites that are “whitelisted” – that list is ever-changing so can become a headache to constantly update which sites you want to block ads on
• Adblock extensions hurt websites that rely on advertising income to produce quality content and stay in business – some publishers like Hulu are fighting back – if you use Adblock plus, Hulu has you disable it to be able to watch your content

SkipIt is fast, fair and will be everywhere

• SkipIt works on any web browser, and the SkipIt invite is served 20 million times a day, all over the web
• Skip it offers ways to earn free skips to keep your skipping experience free
• SkipIt saves time – when logged into SkipIt, it’s one click to skip, and then go to your video content immediately
• SkipIt is automatic and requires no manual effort or regular maintenance of websites you want to skip ads on
• SkipIt is fair to website publishers – you can skip, and publishers still get paid (often MORE than if the ad had run in the first place)

There is a better way.  SkipIt is leading the charge to give consumers more control and choice online, while making sure publishers get paid fairly for their video content, and advertisers don’t pay for ads that are skipped, thus eliminating waste.  Everyone wins.

We here at SkipIt are not only about saving time but creating a new product that will break through and change the industry.

In our second episode of “SkipIt Pioneers,” we bring you Karl Benz.  The German engineer was always thinking about new ways to implement his great ideas, and one of those ideas was to create a gasoline-powered automobile.

As a young man, Benz grew tired of seeing horse-wagons carrying people around or watching people walk to places that would always take forever to get to. He knew if he could create a gas-powered automobile to skip all those scenarios, people would utilize it and get to their destination in no time. Why walk somewhere, when you have a gas-powered automobile, saving you precious time?

We understand how that can feel. That’s why we made SkipIt, the modern version of Karl Benz’s automobile, allowing you to skip digital video ads while everybody else is stuck walking through them.

We give many thanks to Karl Benz, another Skipping Pioneer, for changing history! Now it’s our turn, with your help, to change the industry. So go ahead and just SkipIt!