What about the blockers that donate to charity? Eyeo, a German software company, says those advertisers who want to get on its so-called “whitelist” must abide by rules against annoying or intrusive ads, but until now has made the final decision on which ads should be allowed.
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Probably the closest contender to the ubiquitous AdBlock Plus, uBlock Origin has been lauded for its lightweight CPU and memory usage, as well as extensive customising options. And last week, the Post said all of its articles will be available through Facebook’s new service for “lightning-fast” reading, sharing and commenting from Apple devices.
Developer of the ad blocker Crystal responded to an inquiry from Fortune and promised it would make sure the shopping sites are no longer blacklisted. And there’s so much consolidation amongst ad networks and analytics providers that they can easily track your behavior across multiple sites, building a creepily accurate and deep profile of your personal information and private business.
Those of us on the more technical side of the industry need to call out unacceptable privacy breaches where we see them. Indeed, Google can build proprietary software to block the ad-block users.
First, we could see online publishers start using more ads that can’t be sniffed out by ad blockers, like native ads or pre-roll ads on video content.
Ghostery seeks to protect users from “scary” tags on pages and other methods of obtaining data.
It could also be that a few users prefer that Purify allows for whitelisting sites they choose, something not possible with Crystal. But the ability to target and track individual users is such a big part of what Internet advertisers do that it’s hard to imagine them giving up without a vicious fight. On Apple’s website, particularly on their developer’s library, a message speaks of the Content Blocking Safari Extensions that new Safari release brings to iOS.
“The issue is really about performance”, Murphy told Ad Exchanger. Be warned, though, of reports about pop-ups still showing but without their content, leaving you with a screen full of blank pages.
But in exchange for paying that 99 cents for an adblocker, iOS users are, in fact, paying for ads. It is estimated ad-blocking will cost publishers $22 billion in revenue in 2015.
“By blocking all advertising with brute-force, it doesn’t promote a healthy mobile Web that is sustainable and allows publishers to make a living from the free content they provide”, Murphy wrote. And so, in 2011, Adblock Plus dropped the approach and the “Acceptable Ads” list was born. There are similar toolkits available for Android developers, too.
Digital media companies rely on advertising for revenue and so in preventing ads appearing, publishers are beginning to struggle as they watch their content get consumed for free while frustrated advertisers stand on the side trying to figure out how they can be heard.
And even if ad blocker users do whitelist their favorite sites, their good web citizenship could be undercut by the ad blockers themselves.
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Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, you are expending one of the world’s most precious commodities: your attention. When the app opens, users will see instructions on how to activate the familiar content blocking features of Adblock Plus within their system-wide iOS settings. That means there’s a good economic reason to install one beyond getting a cleaner web browsing experience.
