Eep, I may have inadvertently been referring to information about internal trials. Suffice it to say that a public offering isn't the first step to trying out a

Eep, I may have inadvertently been referring to information about internal trials. Suffice it to say that a public offering isn't the first step to trying out a product direction, nor is it the only way to get feedback from the market (given that a tried and failed public product incurs substantial costs). EDIT: thanks to the downthread comment, I see that the pilot I was thinking of apparently became Contributor. This is pretty much exactly what many in this thread are talking about, with the significant difference being that there are few participating sites, and the ones on there are generally targeted at the kinds of demographics who care an unusual amount about avoiding ads. The reason there's barely any buy-in on the content provider side is because most sites know that their readers wouldn't like it.