Apple's "evil/genius" plan to punk the web and gild the iPad

[ojbyrne]

I suddenly reflected on the absurdity of

a. paying for hardware

b. paying for apps

c. paying for airtime

... in order to see ads.

[pwim]

Newspapers, magazines, cable television, DVDs, movies in the theatre, all of these you pay for and yet still see ads.

Why should a product just have one revenue model? If it weren't for advertising, these products would have to charge more to generate the same revenue.

[dlsspy]

This is why I canceled cable many years ago. I was paying for it, as well as TiVo service and getting lots of ads, including ads on the shows I was watching.

[mawhidby]

Just to clarify - are iAds only supposed to be implemented on free apps? Or, in other words, is there anything stopping an app developer from including iAds in a paid app?

Also, do you think a developer would make more money with a free, iAd version over a paid app? If so, developers would obviously be more enticed to offer a free, iAd version, which would also make Apple more money (40% of iAd revenue versus 30% for paid apps).

[sjwright]

Fortunately, you probably won't be seeing ads if (b) is true. Or if you are, demand a refund.

[ahoyhere]

You pay for your car, your parking, your highway taxes, and your gas... only to have your view of the roadside covered by billboards.

The alternative? Pay for your software, too. There's no reason it should be free.

[philwelch]

A company isn't like a single group of people, really. It's more like a confederation of affiliated fiefdoms. Some companies are worse than others in this regard (for instance, you can actually find pirated copies of Windows 7 by searching on Bing: http://www.bing.com/search?q=%2bpirate+windows+7&FORM=RC...) but even Apple is somewhat affected.

In one office, one group of people working on Safari decided Readability was a good idea worthy of reimplementation. In another office, possibly another building, another group of people decided iAd would be a good idea. Any higher ups, including Steve, probably agreed with both assessments without thinking to put the two together, because they have far more important work to do than designing absurd conspiracies to "punk the web and gild the iPad".

[cobralibre]

This is certainly true of many companies and may well be true of Apple, too, though it doesn't really fit the prevailing narrative we have of Apple as a company precisely steered by an extremely hands-on executive team.

Personally, I'm tickled by this silly and completely implausible variant of the "corporation as federation" idea: That the the executive team is focused on the iOS platform to such an extent that the desktop Safari team implemented Reader -- "annoying ads" marketing and all -- simply to see if they could get away with it.

[hinting]

Yes, it's a grand conspiracy. The only other possible explanation would be:

1) Readability got popular. It's a good idea so they baked it into the browser.

2) There is plenty of money in ads. Apple decided they wanted some of this money instead of funneling it to a direct competitor.

I prefer the conspiracy idea myself.

[ilovecomputers]

Reading this Ken Fisher article was akin to reading a blog post.

This is why I look to authors like John Siracusa for quality articles on Ars Technica. This article however, is just a giant assumption that is likely to not be true.

[masklinn]

> Readability got popular. It's a good idea so they baked it into the browser.

Also, Instapaper. Marco Arment (IP developer) once wrote that some people use IP not for articles they want to read later but for articles they want to read right now, just because it's so good at making articles readable.

[chaosmachine]

"Reader mode seems to only be available on pages that the browser thinks are articles"

Someone will write a javascript workaround that stops "reader mode" from triggering. If it's just a simple heuristic, it should be easy to defeat.

[dangrover]

I don't think you've actually used it. it doesn't just "trigger" and block just ads from appearing. You still see the ads and everything on e page. On certain pages, you can optionally, manually enter a mode that just brings the text into focus.

[mechanical_fish]

On the other hand, if the heuristic is "pay a bunch of Mechanical Turkers five cents per website to classify typical pages from websites as 'articles' or 'not articles'" it's going to be pretty difficult to defeat.

Why bother with artificial intelligence when the real thing is so inexpensive?

Indeed, you might not even have to pay. Just build a system to report bugs. People may happily self-report when their adblocker fails to function on pages where they want it to function.

I suppose there might be tricks, like chopping your page up into misarranged divs and then unshuffling them with CSS and/or JS, that make it really hard to scrape the content for Articles, even if you know that the page should be an article. That class of hacks will cost you in accessibility, though, and they can't be great for SEO.

[silvestrov]

Someone might even write a Safari 5 extension which implements the reader functionality, and which is automatically updated whenever sites try to block it.

And Safari extensions loads automatically, so the user don't even have to hit the "reader" button.

[rubinelli]

How come Apple always pulls off stuff Microsoft would never get away with?

[mechanical_fish]

I'd reverse the question:

Why doesn't Firefox already do this out of the box? It's not as if adblocking is a particularly new concept. This is ten-year-old technology. It's not as if adblocking isn't known to be something people want: Geeks use it all the time.

[ugh]

Sorry, but what do you mean with “would never get away with”?

Everyone’s screaming about this, it’s completely blown out of proportion and crazy conspiracy theories are formulated. That’s different to how the press reacts to Microsoft or Google – exactly, how?

[tvon]

Apple doesn't have a monopoly on anything.

Still, they seem intent on pushing the limits.

[evo_9]

To me this is more about Apple attacking back at Google. Jobs made a comment about how it wasn't them (Apple) that entered their (Googles) market referring to Googles entering the smartphone market.

Apple is attacking Google on two fronts - the Web, a move to hit Google in the money belt via Reader and it's ad-blocking features; secondly, copying Google's advertising monetization methods to reap potentially Google like (aka huge) profits via iAd, and again limit/control Google/other advertising platforms's on their iOS's.

I got to hand it to Apple, it's a pretty good strategy. I suspect they won't suffer much backlash from this hypocrisy beyond the tech crowd though.

[joe_the_user]

It really doesn't matter who hit first. Apple and Google have different and conflicting business models (and arguably views of the world). Their war is inevitable. Both companies are in it for profit but that's not what I care about.

I am Google partisan in the war simply because Google's model seems to imply an open world whereas Apple's model seems to imply a closed world.

[av500]

Does anybody remember the time when articles on the web were mostly single page (and you scrolled down to read them - hey mice even have scroll wheels for that)? Then the ads people figured that they can cram in more ads by splitting articles every 10 lines and reading them became totally annoying. If Apple can force the content back to single page, I am all for it...

[risotto]

Nobody uses Safari and a fraction of this nobody uses Readability (however apple brands it)

Chrome and Firefox have a plugin architecture and ad block.

Jailbreak you iPad and block iAds in /etc/hosts

Enjoy modern life and the Internet and gadgets.

[blocke]

Chrome and Firefox have a plugin architecture and don't have ad block built-in as shipped. Huge difference there.

(On a sidenote I'm still using Firefox over Chrome as Firefox is still the superior adblock platform. ;)

[swaroop]

FYI, Safari 5 has extensions - http://www.apple.com/safari/whats-new.html#developer_program

[CoryMathews]

Or... download Opera and the ad block is built in.

[kylemathews]

Or in other words, Safari's reader is going to kill our page views and ad click-through rates and we're mad about that because we're not getting rich on Apple's app store like everyone else.

[masklinn]

Thing is, it's not even going to do that. You have to be on the (first) page to trigger Reader, so you'll see ads anyway, and it will fetch all the pages one by one when reformatting them.

They just built Readability in the browser (literally, there are acknowledgements to Readability in Saf 5)

[wmf]

If Ars believes that there's more money to be made from the App Store than from the Web, they're welcome to release an app.

[gte910h]

Block them then.

[paulnelligan]

Somehow I don't think the web will even miss a beat as a result of this. Content will still live on, People will still use computers to browse. I'm pretty sure I'll still be able to get news from my favourite sources, maybe those people with iPads and iPhones will pay for this content for me by watching ads. That's fine with me!

I had an iPhone which broke after 15 months, and have ordered an Android phone and couldn't be happier about it. I really don't feel like I'm missing out on anything.

[tomlin]

Article has some good points, but even my somewhat temperate view of Apple (I find the type of devotion a little like Scientology, to be honest) doesn't make me believe "Reader" is a nefarious scheme to overtake advertising -- although I am sure that wouldn't be looked down upon internally.

[mambodog]

I see this as a good thing for the web. Now websites (that are serving articles) have to compete with the layout/presentation of Reader, both in terms of having nice, readable typography and layout, and having appealing, non-obnoxious ads, like some of the higher end of print ads.

[protomyth]

I saw this feature and thought of the built-in Universal Access on the Macs. Going along those lines, a lot of pages have way too small text and this is a more convenient way of reading those pages then constantly adjusting font sizes.

[yumraj]

I find what Apple is attempting to be absolutely ridiculous and rather brazen.

I won't be surprised that if the Safari reader mode becomes popular, the big content provider and news sites start blocking Safari.

[rimantas]

I doubt there is a way to detect is someone uses this mode or not. Safari loads the full page, and then you have an option to trigger reader mode, which does not even replace the page: it's like lightbox for images: original page is dimmed and you get nicely formatted text in front of it.

[alsomike]

The only publishers that this will affect are the ones that ignore readability and user experience. That's the only time you'd use this feature. I think letting users punish poor design is brilliant way to create the right incentives.