That declaration gave Apple a moral reason to carve Google services out of its ecosystem. And then we have Facebook that has the most daily visitors and its own advertising too, and especially mobile is becoming dominant.
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Following the release the apps nearly immediately rose to the top of the download rankings.
Eyeo, the maker of Adblock Plus on PCs, recently launched a mobile browser which blocks ads without additional extensions. Readers turned off by sluggish, subpar reading experiences have voted with their mice, and publishers have hopefully gotten the message.
That’s the problem: Using an ad blocker can make your Web surfing less annoying, to be sure. Blocking on mobiles is lower everywhere except India and China – in the United Kingdom just 00.1% – but Apple could change that rapidly. It’s just that now consumers have a way to do something about them. Ad blockers come with an important asterisk: “while they do benefit a ton of people in major ways, they also hurt some, including many who don’t deserve the hit”.
At the same time we must not underestimate the importance of advertising. “Is it more existential?” “As a publisher you are relatively powerless, your key revenue generator is being undermined”. Many sites load a lot of content and code that isn’t necessary to actually display a site, but instead supports under the hood stuff like tracking how you use a specific site, what you’re looking at, the searches you perform, and where you go when you leave for a different site. Advertisers have spent the last decade focusing on data to the exclusion of emotion, which is what makes people respond to ads in the first place.
The two newest iPhones will be available in most Apple Stores from this Friday, September 25. Interestingly, or not, their zap in mobile Safari doesn’t apply to the News app, from which Apple generates revenue.
The more money they have, the more likely they are to block ads. “If we don’t have our own answer we’ll be no further along”.
That means the potential for ad blocking to dent revenue for websites and advertisers is increasing. “You need to do what you can to attack the root”, says Hartman. “Don’t hold the user hostage with long pre-rolls and pop-ups”. There are plenty of businesses that have shown that people are willing to pay for content if it is packaged such that they can easily see value for money. (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s ad blocker move previously.
First of all, head over to the iTunes App Store and download the content blocker of your choice.
In a recent post titled “the ethics of modern web ad-blocking”, Peace’s Marco Arment justified his view that ad blockers were a good idea by saying ads made the user experience awful and that users never consented to being served ads and being tracked online.
Others have called the ethical argument nonsense.
Media companies are groping for answers, sparking an arms race between ad-blocking companies and anti-ad blocking companies such as PageFair and Sourcepoint that try to disarm the systems for website owners.
Then there are the walled gardens created by others. While I still think that Google has the advantage, with its Maps having better data and better search results, Apple’s version has come a long way.
Apple is promising up to one-hour of additional battery life thanks to extra efficiencies throughout the OS.
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Publishers could revert to integrating each ad into the foundation of each webpage, much like a printed ad is inked on to the same paper as the article next to it. That would allow them to cut out the middlemen delivering ads that the ad blockers target. But, even the big card-linked offers players admit that they haven’t exactly set the world on fire these last few years. “We will have a business in some way, shape or form”. “I would be more anxious if I was an ad tech business”.
