Those ads also frequently and extensively track users’ behavior and movements, often without their knowledge or explicit consent. He warned that people shouldn’t ever “make trade-offs between privacy and security”, and that “free” services actually came at “a very high cost”. Alternative revenue sources do exist, and we try our hand by suggesting Amazon products and deals for example, but how many of us would genuinely sign up to a subscription model to read or view content on our favorite sites? Apple uses a closed hardware and software ecosystem to lock in users, so booting Google out of that walled garden makes flawless business sense.
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Previous versions of Apple’s mobile operating system had no official support for ad blocking.
The most popular ad blockers: Peace, Purify and Crystal and 1Blocker, all shot up to the top of the paid app store charts shortly after release. A recent Cyphort report showed “malvertising” – where hackers insert malicious ads into legit online operations – more than quadrupled in the past year . Ad Block says it understands, and that’s why it has approved ads that, in its mind, keeps the gears of advertising commerce going without unduly annoying the masses.
This is going to change, of course, as mobile advertising grows, but the ad industry always moves much more slowly than user behavior.
Safari’s ad blockers – more correctly called content blockers – are implemented in a way to be performant whilst also separating the blocking script from any visibility from the underlying page.
But my goodness! Ad Block Plus first obliterates the “problem” – then puts itself in the position of deciding what is not a problem – that is, the ads and formats it has decided are worthy.
With so many content blockers out there, it’s a challenge to decide which one is right for you. Apple’s move to leave blocking to 3rd party apps is smart – it probably guarantees that when there are new ways to avoid blocking, we will soon see a new blocker to handle them.
There could, though, be one unintended outcome of the ad blocking that would be welcomed by many veterans in the sales departments of newspapers and magazines. Native ads, advertorials and branded content are all formats that have been buzzwords for quite some time for anyone involved in website copywriting or content production. There were rumors that Google was circumventing AdBlock Plus with its pre-roll ads on YouTube, but Eyeo claims that it was just a bug.
Why Do People Use Content Blockers?
Apple, on the other hand, make their money selling overpriced devices that just happen to connect to the internet.
In February 2015, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford found that 41% of US internet users used ad-blocking software on their desktop or laptop PCs, vs. 34% of internet users in the UK.
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With the ad blockers in place users will no longer be plagued with unnecessary content. Extra content will be out of the way and in turn web pages will load more quickly.
