• by Catharine P. Taylor , October 31, 2014

It appears the Social Media Insider is not the only one who keeps wondering if there’s traction in ad-free social platforms. Imagine my surprise this morning when I discovered that last week’s column – on how ad-free Ello plans to make money – had 106 shares, ranking it third in the last year behind the column on The New York Times Innovation Report (136 shares), and Restoration Hardware’s wrong-headed are you f*ckin’ kidding me?   mailing of catalogs so heavy you can use them to outfit your home gym (108 shares).

Um, wow. And only some of those shares, I should add, were from bots!

As if that weren’t enough, this week, someone far more important than the Social Media Insider weighed in on the subject of non ad-supported revenue models. During her appearance at Re/Code’s Code/Mobile conference, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said, “YouTube right now is ad-supported, which is great because it has enabled us to scale to a billion users; but there are going to be cases where people are going to say, 'I don’t want to see the ads, or I want to have a different experience.’”

Stop a minute, and let this sink in. Someone who essentially works for Google – and spent most of her career at the mother ship – is saying there is room for ad-free models. Maybe you didn’t notice this news because you were too busy freaking yourself out about Ebola, but this is news. And good news, because we are going to want a pretty sweet online experience when we’re all quarantined.

Now, you could argue that Wojcicki comes at this from a pretty safe place. YouTube may be a social network, but it is also a video network. Any site with that profile has a safe haven in the fact that people increasingly pay for premium video experiences, from Netflix to Hulu.

But, let’s look at the flip side, shall we? Let’s take Wojcicki’s quote and replace the word YouTube with the names of other online entities:

• “[Facebook] right now is ad-supported, which is great because it has enabled us to scale to a billion users; but there are going to be cases where people are going to say, 'I don’t want to see the ads, or I want to have a different experience.’"

• “[AOL] right now is ad-supported, which is great because it has enabled us to scale to [millions of] users; but there are going to be cases where people are going to say, 'I don’t want to see the ads, or I want to have a different experience.’”

• “[ESPN.com] right now is ad-supported, which is great because it has enabled us to scale to [millions of] users; but there are going to be cases where people are going to say, 'I don’t want to see the ads, or I want to have a different experience.’”

Do any of those sentences sound crazy to you? I didn’t think so.