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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.

Our Business Model

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 don't:
  • Swap out ads and replace them with our own. We are not in the business of taking revenue from publishers.
  • Take affiliate commissions from publishers or creators. Our ad blocker actually does the opposite: it helps ensure creator and publisher affiliate links work as expected. Most ad blockers just block affiliate tracking and payments which directly hurts creators.
We help people earn rewards, even when Pie doesn't make money:
  • If a store offers cash back incentives to a user we pass 100% of the commission we collect directly to the user as rewards.
  • If publishers offer a user an incentive to allow ads on their site we pass 100% to our users as rewards. While we test this feature we are funding the rewards on many sites ourselves.
How we make money:
  • 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 in Public

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

Read the original letter from August 2024

We are on a mission to rebuild the internet with people in control.

This starts with rebooting the economic engine that powers the internet.

Today the largest tech companies make over $100 billion dollars every year auctioning off your attention to the highest bidder. You pay for this in more ways than you think — an internet littered with aggressive ads, your data sold to spy on you for ad targeting, and inflated product prices due to excessive advertising costs.

Now imagine an internet where you aren't just a product to be harvested, but a valued creator and owner. Where the tech companies you use every day are aligned with your best interest and reward you for your contributions. That's the vision behind The People's Internet Experiment (pie.org).

We started by creating a free adblocker that gives you control of your internet experience. We added the option to enable Rewards for Ads. Now you can get paid a fair share to opt into ads you approve.

To make your shopping experience better, we built the fastest automatic application of coupons at thousands of your favorite stores. Then we added a cash back program that the adblocker doesn't break, so you actually get your rewards.

This is just the start. I've assembled a team of some of the most creative people that built Honey to invent new ways to share more of the advertising pie with you.

I hope you'll join us and let us know what you think!

Ryan Hudson

Founder, Pie

Are you an advertiser or merchant? Learn more about what this means for you.

Working at Pie

Are you interested in building great products that reshape the internet?

FAQs

Want to learn even more? Check out our Help page
How does Pie help creators?
Pie is a unique ad blocker designed to help creators make more money, not less. We do this with a few types of features.
  1. Support lists for creators (coming very soon).
    1. For example, on Youtube we encourage users to allow ads from their favorite channels. We make it easy for a user to decide to support individual creators or to support all of the channels they subscribe to. With one click of a link creators can encourage viewers to support them.
  2. We help protect affiliate links.
    1. Unlike most ad blockers that simply break affiliate link tracking, Pie protects creator affiliate links to help creators earn more money.
  3. Creators can earn money partnering with Pie.
    1. We pay creators who help spread the word about our creator-friendly approach to ad blocking. We do this both through sponsorships and with smaller creators using their tracking links. If you'd like to partner with us, email sponsorships@pie.org.
In the future we may build features to let creators give rewards to users who subscribe, allow ads, or otherwise support their channels.
We understand that helping creators work with their audience to make more money means more content and a richer internet for everyone. There is a lot we can build here and this will be an important focus for our product roadmap.
How does Pie help advertisers?
Today's internet users are getting harder and harder to reach with advertising. In fact there is an entire cohort of nearly a billion ad block users that is largely inaccessible to internet ad campaigns. Pie can help reach these users, on their own terms where they are happy to engage with ads.
  1. Opt in to support creators and publishers
    1. Pie users opt in to see the ads you show them to support great content. Your ads will show in a favorable context with content from publishers that consumers love.
  2. New ad formats to reward attention and engagement
    1. Pie lets advertisers directly reach people interested in their products and reward them for paying attention.
  3. More cost effective than most other channels
    1. When users want ads, they work better. An ad no one wants wastes everyone's time and energy. An ad people want feels like content and reduces the cost for advertisers.
  4. In a privacy respecting way
    1. We give people full control over their advertising experience. For some people this means no ads. For others this means they'd love to hear from brands they care about. Instead of carpet bombing the internet with cookies, we have tools for advertisers to reach users who would like to be reached without all of the unwanted surveillance.
How is Pie Adblock different from other ad blockers?
There are several different types of ad blockers used by nearly a billion people today. Pie has a different approach.
At one extreme is ad blockers that are designed to block everything. All ads. All trackers. uBlock Origin is the best example of this and it works incredibly well for tens of millions of people. But it, and blockers like it, also completely break the ability for publishers and creators to make money from their content, jeopardizing free content on the internet.
Another model for ad blocking is “Acceptable Ads” where publishers and advertisers pay the ad blocker to allow their ads through. Some of the most popular ad blockers (AdBlock and Adblock Plus) use this model to make money, none of which is shared with the users.
Pie has an option available for publishers and advertisers we call “Fair Ads” where they can pay users (not us) to allow ads through. The huge difference between Fair Ads and Acceptable Ads is that we give 100% of the money from Fair Ads to our users to encourage them to participate in a healthy online ecosystem.
Pie is the only ad blocker with an option to receive Rewards for Ads when users opt in to advertising, on their own terms.
Is Pie.org owned by Google or YouTube?
No. Pie is not owned or affiliated with Google or Youtube. To help spread the word about Pie we purchase some advertising from Google and Youtube just like any other advertiser would.
Why are Pie Adblock ads so annoying?
We have tested a wide variety of different ad creatives and have tried all sorts of different tones and messaging. Our main goal is to ensure that we are always being truthful and direct with our ads. However, the tone of some ads doesn't always resonate with all potential users -- but we take feedback seriously (email us at marketing@pie.org) and are continuously evolving our ads to be both performant and hopefully interesting. If you have ideas for future ads, send them our way! A few users have already sent us some really fun ones. At the end of the day, we don't want you to see these ads -- we want you to be blocking them.
Is Pie Adblock too good to be true?
"Is Pie a scam?" No, it truly works and provides an excellent utility to users while creating economic value for all parties involved. But that is easy for us to say -- which is why we are committed to building as much trust as possible by continuing to be transparent about our product strategy and how we operate as a business. As a consumer product, we look at it as extremely healthy for the public to have criticisms and hold us accountable. An active online community means that we must operate with transparency, integrity, and judiciousness beyond that of pretty much any startup. In other words, by using Pie, you will be guaranteed to be using a product that the online community is holding to an extremely high standard. And our team will work to live up to that standard or we will not succeed, it is as simple as that. As part of that transparency, we will continue to make more of our code open source over time so that people can understand every aspect of what we do.
Is Pie Adblock open source?
Limited parts of Pie are open source today, but we plan to increase this for both our ad blocking extension and our shopping extension soon. Stay tuned. You can find the link to our GitHub here.
Does Pie replace the affiliate cookies of creators or publishers?
No, Pie does not replace the affiliate cookies of creators or publishers. We give our users the option of cash back rewards, but not at the expense of overriding existing attribution. Specifically we try to identify existing affiliate cookies and if they have been present for 7 days or less we do not offer the user a cash back option. Furthermore, when we do offer cash back at a store we pass 100% of the revenue we earn to our users, so we do not have a financial incentive to override existing affiliate tags or cookies. We make money in other ways like Instant Rewards - Learn more
How does Pie help publishers?
Pie is an ad blocker engineered to help publishers make more money, not less. Sounds counterintuitive, so how do we do it?
  1. Put users in control of their ad experience.
    1. Users choose to use ad blockers for a variety of reasons. Starving their favorite websites of revenue to create content is not on that list. Our ad blocker is designed to encourage users to allow ads from sites they regularly visit while protecting them from potentially malicious ad experiences when they click on random links on the internet.
  2. Reward users who opt in to better publisher monetization
    1. We have optional tools for publishers to give users a share of incremental advertising revenue when they allow ads on their website. We pass 100% of this revenue to the user as an incentive to opt in to ads. We call this Fair Ads as it aligns the interests of publishers, users, and advertisers. Are you a publisher who wants to be in our pielot (pun intended) program? Email us at publishers@pie.org.
  3. Use Pie Rewards points to unlock premium content (future)
    1. Pie users earn rewards points as they browse and shop on the internet. Today they can only use them to cash out. Soon they will have a fully funded wallet attached to their browser and can easily make very low cost micro payments - even automatically. Have ideas on what you'd like to offer? We are looking for early partners for this program so let us know.
How does Pie make money?
  • 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.
Is Pie owned by PayPal or Honey?
No. Pie is not owned or affiliated with PayPal or Honey in any way. We do not have a partnership with PayPal nor are they investors or stakeholders in Pie. Pie's founder, Ryan Hudson, left PayPal/Honey 3 years ago and the original Honey that was beloved by millions of users was sold to PayPal over 5 years ago. Pie offers PayPal as one vendor for rewards points redemption because it allows for international payouts. More redemption options will be added soon.
Why does Pie.org use a .org domain?
The minimum bid to buy pie.com was over $20 million. We are a startup and thought pie.org might be just as easy to remember. And 1000 times cheaper at "only" $25,000. We also think .org fits our mission to make the internet work better for users, publishers, and advertisers.
Does Pie sell my data?
No, Pie does not sell your data to advertisers, data brokers, or anyone else. You can read more about this in our privacy policy. We're committed to building user trust through transparency and ensuring that all economic value created by Pie flows back to our users where possible.
We only collect data that directly powers features designed to benefit you. If you disable a feature in your settings that requires specific data, we also stop collecting any related telemetry because there's no longer a way to use that data to improve your experience.
Some users have asked for a way to sell their own data for their own benefit. While we don't currently offer this feature, we might explore it in the future if it's something enough users want. If we ever built this, it would be an opt-in feature designed explicitly for those users who want to participate
Is Pie Rewards a cryptocurrency?
No, Pie Reward points are not a cryptocurrency. However, like cryptocurrency, Pie Rewards have a lot of interesting potential use cases on the internet, especially ones that aren't well served by traditional payment systems. We are very excited to have a self-funding wallet that users can take with them everywhere on the internet. This potentially allows micro payments to unlock content or tip creators or anything else people can dream up. While it would be technically possible to implement this on a blockchain with cryptocurrency we are currently maintaining the ledger in a database to maintain maximum flexibility in the future. The current regulatory and technical frameworks are in transition and we'd like to make thoughtful long term choices before locking into one path. Maybe Pie Rewards will be crypto some day, but not yet.
Does Pie Adblock swap out ads from publishers or creators and replace them with their own?
No, Pie does not swap out any ads and replace them with our own. If you see an ad embedded on a site that has a pie icon then that means that you are seeing that ad as part of our Fair Ads program. This means that we are allowing the existing publisher ads to display to users that have Rewards for Ads enabled and they are receiving rewards for seeing those ads. The funding for those rewards either comes from the publisher paying to cover the cost of rewards (100% of which goes to users) or is self-funded by Pie as a benefit to our users.
What is Pie Shopping's coupon control policy? How do you handle merchant requests for adding/removing coupons?
If a merchant reaches out to us (whether they are partnered with us or not) about coupon management, we will only remove the following types of coupon codes:
  • Employee-only codes (including ones used by their customer service team only)
  • Military discount codes
  • Student discount codes
  • Codes that are not functional and should have already been expired/removed**
If there is a publicly available code that is accessible to users via a simple google search, e.g. “Podcast10” then we will remove that code only if there is an equal value code that is available to use instead, e.g. “Discount10”
Partners: if you want to give us a custom code that is unique to the Pie platform, the format we use for these codes is "Pop{X}" where X is the discount percentage or amount (e.g., $5). If there are other publicly available codes with bigger discounts, those will still be used instead of any unique codes.
**Although we try to do this programmatically, there are occasionally sites that can show "false positive" coupon success and therefore erroneously remain in the system. We will remove these manually if they are brought to our attention.
Have ideas on other ways we could manage this? Let us know your suggested improvements at product@pie.org.