Honey Chrome-Extension Founder Launches New Category of Ad Blocker

Familiar with Honey? The Chrome extension app that automatically deploys coupon codes on checkout pages.

Its founders, Ryan Hudson and George Ruan, sold the company to PayPal in 2020 for $4bn.

One of those founders, Ryan Hudson, has recently launched an ad blocker — pretty discreetly I might add. You won’t see any news headlines for it, yet.

The product is called Pie. And, it looks and feels pretty different to virtually all existing ad blockers on the market. He is not doing this alone, supporting him is 30 ex team members from Honey. People that know and understand the Chrome extension space very well.

In a nutshell, Pie’s value proposition is “Block ads, get paid” (their words). Its UX is much more mainstream-consumer centric than the standard for the ad blocking browser extension category (which often feels very ‘built by programmer for programmers’ oriented).

Ryan has been soliciting feedback for it on a reddit AMA, as well as appearing on an episode of This Week in Startups with Jason Calacanis to detail his mission and reason for launching a new company.

In the reddit AMA, he announced:

He then detailed Pie’s mission:

There’s two main takeaways from this:

1. Pie has the potential to unlock a new growth phase in consumer ad blocking adoption. As a product it feels much more approachable for the masses and it has the additional lure of “getting paid”.

2. This isn’t some hobby or get-richer-quicker scheme. Ryan has a strong philosophy and vision towards what he is building. Too “reboot the economic engine that powers the internet” (his words).

New category

I downloaded Pie and it definitely feels like a new category of ad blocker. Not because of any one thing it does, but the holistic experience:

• The UX, branding, and design is inviting and intuitive.

• It blocks cookie consent pop ups and adblock walls by default.

• It pays you to see Pie-sourced ads if you opt into do so.

You can feel the difference right away, from the onboarding experience.

If you were to get reductive with it, you could argue there’s nothing radically new about it:

• Gener8 rewards its users for sharing data

• Ghostery nowadays has a more friendly UX and design

• Ghostery also blocks cookie consent pop ups and adblock walls by default

But, that’s not how it feels. It feels fresh.

There’s also some pretty neat and innovative features that I have not seen before and were taken aback with. For example, on the second screen of the setup process, it prompts you to disable other ad blockers that are turned on in Chrome:

Context: I have a lot of ad blockers running at once. For me, when I clicked “auto-disable” it instantly disabled the most popular ad blockers: Adblock Plus, Adblock, AdGuard, uBlock Origin etc.

Poof. Gone. Just like that.

The smaller extensions (like Stands Adblocker and Adblocker Ultimate stayed on).

This is pretty wild stuff. It sets a new standard for the rules of the category: ad blockers can and will now delete other ad blockers upon install.

Another screen in the setup process invited me to see ads that I will get paid for:

Main features

Most of the main features are what you would expect from an ad blocker —e.g. blocking ads and trackers. But, there’s a few surprises:

1. Cookie consent pop ups and “turn off your ad blocker walls” are blocked by default and for free. Very few ad blockers offer this.

2. You get paid to be exposed to “Pie-approved ads”. Like-for-like, no ad blockers offer this.

3. There’s a “visual mode” that dramatises ads being removed from the webpage. A Pie-branded placeholder image quickly vanishes where the ad would otherwise load. The closest thing to this experience is Apple’s Distraction Control.

This “visual mode” can be turned off in favour of “classic mode”, which is the regular experience you get from ad blockers, whereby nothing loads at all.

To be honest, I think this will happen a lot. I can’t see “visual mode” sticking as an ongoing feature that most users will have turned on. It’s fun and rewarding at first, but ultimately it just adds unnecessary mental friction to consuming content over the long-term. But, it might have its place as a way to help differentiate Pie among its competitive set during the discovery and setup phase.

Rewarded ads

There are 3 types of ads that you can get rewarded for as a user. They are:

1. Fair Ads. This is currently in development and not live (it’s Pie’s version of Acceptable Ads).

2. Instant Rewards. This prompts the user to take a sponsored action (like checking out a store or running a search on a partner site).

3. Cash back. This returns a small % of money to customers after they have made a purchase via an affiliate partner (one of the oldest models on the Internet).

Traction & progress

Since launching 2 months ago, Pie has amassed over 500,000 downloads on Chrome. That’s a lot — and its not all organic. The team have been driving installs through YouTube ads. So far, the reviews have been very good: 4.8/5 stars on Chrome.

Not bad for initial user cohort testing. Not bad at all.

If the team is able to thread the value proposition needle to encourage strong retention, monetisation, and low user acquisition costs, it has the potential to scale very fast.

I can see how this might ‘cross over’ and unlock a new wave of mainstream adoption for ad blockers. But, there’s a lot of challenges to overcome first.

In future posts I will delve into dimensions of this in more detail and context.

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