Note: this article is based purely on a theoretical idea, designed to get you thinking about other ways of looking at blog monetization methods than advertising

I was reading the training materials on Teaching Sells, and was struck by two of the arguments presented in the first module (and the free report, if I remember correctly?):

• Paid-for content has a higher perceived value than free content, even if it’s the exact same content overall.
• People are willing to pay, just to avoid the increasingly intrusive advertising in their content.

When I churned these two ideas over in my head, an idea emerged. Why not take your standard monetized blog - advertising and all - and offer people a means to pay to receive an Ad-free version. Readers who pay will theoretically value your content more because

1. they’ve paid for it, and
2. the advertising was removed.

Potentially this would mean more loyal readers who are happy to spread the word about your site, thus increasing your mind share (and potential subscriber base).

I imagine you could do this with Paypal subscriptions integrated with some sort of registration system. I suppose Wordpress could manage it, with some modifications. If the user reading your site has logged in, and have paid up, they receive a version of the site with all advertising removed. Otherwise they receive the bog-standard version laced with Adsense and the like.

I can’t imagine this working for everyone, but surely it would work for some bloggers. It would certainly help to diversify a blogs’ income stream.

So what do you think to the idea? Basically it would be like asking readers to get a TV license for your blog, and like how the BBC (supposedly) uses its license fee, presumably you would use the money raised to help fund you producing better and better content?