Growing The Pie Together

January 2025

The People's Internet Experiment, better known as Pie, is exactly that: an experiment to see what can happen if we put people in control of their internet experiences.

We created this company to build tools for real people that want to help the internet thrive.

We've started by building an ad blocker that over a million people have discovered in just our first few months since launch.

What makes our approach to ad blocking different is that we are creating tools and incentives to help creators and publishers earn more money, not less. Great content takes time and money to create and we want more of it.

If everyone used existing ad blockers, the economic model for a free and open internet would collapse, and with a billion users blocking ads we can all see the strains of this for publishers and creators trying to find new ways to get by.

But the internet without an ad blocker has become unenjoyable, hostile or even dangerous to you as a user: your data is auctioned off to the highest bidder, you are bombarded with ads screaming for your attention and malware is always lurking.

There is a better way: Give people full control of their personal browsing experience and encourage them to participate in effective advertising to support the open internet.

For some people this will mean no ads, and that is ok. But we believe most people will enjoy supporting their favorite creators and publishers, especially when they can earn rewards along the way.

At Pie we are building tools to make these choices as easy as possible.

Pie is a different type of company with a new business model so people rightfully have questions on how we plan to make money.

We want to give anyone control over their internet experience so we do not plan to charge people for most of our products. But people (correctly) understand that typically if you aren't paying for the product then you are the product, so this will continue to create confusion.

We want to be as clear as possible about how we do and don't make money, and how we think about it. Feedback is always welcome at product@pie.org

• We only make money building new experiences that don't exist and that people want. We try to align the incentives of users with advertisers, publishers, and creators around these new options.
• The best current example of this is an optional feature we call “Instant Rewards” where people can earn rewards for engaging with entirely new advertising experiences added to their Pie browsing experience. We think of it as a way for advertisers to directly reach and reward people for their attention instead of wasting their time or yelling the loudest.
• We're a new company and will try a lot of new things like Instant Rewards and keep the ones people like. As a company we will make money when we build new things that people get value from, not by exploiting others.
• Our share of the value created may vary based on what we build in the future, but for something like Instant Rewards, our plan is to split revenue with users while creating new value for advertisers reaching engaged users more efficiently than is available through other ad channels.

Building a company that simultaneously impacts so many different constituencies on the internet is going to be a huge challenge. Balancing the desires and needs of end users, publishers, content creators, advertisers, affiliate networks, retailers, etc is extremely complex and will involve tradeoffs that could favor one group over another.

Given this we've decided we need to be as public about our plans, goals, thought process, and intentions as we can. And solicit feedback from everyone. As a startup, this adds risk because it means anyone could copy our roadmap or try to use what we say against us.

But there is also a huge advantage to building as a community. In fact it is the only way this can work. If you have ideas or would like to get involved please let us know. We are a small team today with much to do.

In the spirit of transparency, we will be following this note in the coming weeks with more updates and details about our product strategy and upcoming roadmap.

Stay tuned!

Ryan & the Pie Team