Our product is Sign it!, which is a legal document translator and simplifier. In this context, when dealing with content of this nature, advertisements significantly decrease the trustworthiness of our product. When dealing with sensitive legal documents, the last thing a user would want is the potential for any sort of privacy compromising advertisements. From our perspective, having an advertisement revenue model would also be detrimental to the image we want our product to have, one that is more professional, so that it can compete with lawyers. In addition, this advertisement model relies on a high number of page views, which is something we don’t anticipate happening with our product.
As such, we aim to support out free pricing model with our more expensive pricing tiers, with those hopefully being paid for buy small businesses rather than individual users. In this sense, the additional revenue that we would be able to bring in should hopefully be a very small amount compared to the revenue we hope to bring in from our pricing model, making the advertisement revenue model unnecessary.
In a larger sense, advertisement revenue models across the internet normalize the selling of user data to advertisers, which is something that I think no internet user should ever want. While yes, advertisements do help make certain products free for the user, for any product that a user really wants to use, and is actually useful, a small price is much easier to swallow than the price of advertisements. In addition, with the proliferation of ad blockers, advertisements no longer have the value they had before, making them a less optimal choice for any product.
