ReadWriteWeb

Since announcing its new subscription plan last week, Apple's move to collect a 30% cut of revenue has had raised the ire of a number of developers and commentators. Mike Melanson offered a round-up on some of the initial reactions, that ranged from "greedy" to "anti-competitive" to "Brilliant, Brazen or Batsh*t Crazy.

Apple's 30% fee is posing problems for a number of companies and developers - those who've built their businesses around the existing rules, for example, and those who don't have the margins to be able to hand over such a cut to Apple. Companies that have raised questions about the new policy run the gamut - music streaming services, e-book sellers, and software-as-a-service developers; big companies and startups alike.

Imagine a world where users aren't irritated by online ads, yet publishers still make money from their content.

When you're done laughing, go check out CancelAds. The basic idea behind their not-so-revolutionary but certainly unheard-of monetization scheme is to have blog subscribers pay small amounts on a recurring basis to read ad-free content online. In a world where free content is a given and what's not free from publishers is made free by pirates, how could a concept like CancelAds survive? Read on to find out what we and CancelAds' founders think.

While reading is one of the main activities on the Internet, a lot of sites pay very little attention to the readability of their text. Instead, the reader's eye is constantly drawn to other UI elements, ads, and widgets. Arc90's Readability experiment is setting out to change this. Readability is a small bookmarklet that extracts the text from almost any web site and displays it on an easy to read page that removes all of the clutter that can make reading on the Internet so hard sometimes.