I posted this on an earlier thread about the morality of AdBlock, but it seem relevant to the discussion:
There is a huge irony in that fact that AdBlock's function of keeping ads away from our content will eventually do the opposite. The alternative to ads alongside my content is ads inside my content.
Let's face it: paywalls don't work. The alternative on the horizon is native advertising. Buzzfeed is now famously refusing to host ads. Instead they sustain themselves by publishing content that subtly supports the agenda of any company with deep enough pockets to pay for it. A viewer's ability to distinguish between native ads and regular articles is small and quickly vanishing. If separate ads stop reaching people, the path to monetization remaining is to change your content to reflect someone else's agenda.
I keep AdBlock off by default because I prefer a world where creators can make a meaningful articles and a useful apps without caring about who they are supporting, and can, as the price tag, separately attach an ad.
I do see it as a moral issue. There are good people making content that's being sustained by ads. I am never going to remember to give them my modicum of support if I don't consider them innocent until proven guilty. It's worth the small annoyance. It's worth the 2 seconds it takes to turn it on for the problematic pages. Hell, you can even map it to a shortcut[1]. It sucks, but the alternative is positively bleak.
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TL;DR: The bathroom may be dirty, but at least no one's taking a shit in my kitchen.
Non-consented advertisement has had their click and buy rate diminish each year, and customers are only getting more dissatisfied by each attempt to squeeze more and more from them. Blocks are the natural step when you have somewhere around less than 0.1% success rate per customer. Mail Spam as advertisements can be seen as the warning sign, and spam protection is today a critical feature that all mail programs must have to be considered functional.
Consented advertisement, on the other hand, is having a great time. More stores are now using club memberships for advertisements, and when Facebook started to only send out a fraction of news letters, some customers went and asked where their news letters has gone. People are actively seeking where their consented advertisement are when it is being blocked.
I find taking a moral stand in the name of non-consented advertisement to be a bit sad. They had their chance with do-not-track and they collectively decided to ignore consent. Instead of taking a step back, they doubled down on being more intrusive and anti-consumer. Now they've got to live with the consequences, while companies reroute money to consented advertisements.
> The alternative to ads alongside my content is ads inside my content.
A false dichotomy if ever there was one. "Paywals" worked in literally every single other sector of the economy for all of recorded human history (I know, I know, who can remember that brief ~6000 year interlude between the Sumerians and the Internet!) The continue to work at your local dry cleaner, grocery store, Home Depot, etc. Really everything that doesn't require a browser. There are all sorts of moral, social, economic, and environmental reasons to be opposed to advertising. I keep AdBlock on by default because I dream of a day when I can pay Google a decent sum of money each month in return for their service.
I see your point, but the the alternative is we need a better solution; blocking ads doesn't mean the writing becomes corrupt and we give up and that's it. Adblocking will lead to content creators finding a better revenue source; there are a lot of people that don't want to compromise themselves by being a paid voice for corporate interests.
Buzzfeed is a poor example; it's just garbage content that is being re-circulated by many different places. There are TONS of sites that have paywalls and/or ads on their sites and their writing is still compromised. So I think paying for content and getting advertisements out of good content is the solution to restore independence, but the price point needs to be right.
I hate blocking ads (I whitelist sites I visit frequently with reasonable ads) but ads have become obnoxious, so AdBlock is a natural reaction to site owners treating users like shit. Sadly, a lot of reasonable sites with unobtrusive ads have gotten caught up in blacklists.
I would pay for good news content if I could pay for a bundle of good content at a fair price. Even something like the NY Times is a hard sell; it feels weird given the wealth of sources and information we have access to these days. NY Times is a great source, but I don't want to only read a single source. And it quickly becomes unaffordable if you want to pay for a lot of sources of information.
Spotify and similar providers solved this with music and I still think a better solution will come out eventually for news. There are a lot of people that want to pay a fair price for good content, but the current options are not very good.
I am going to guess half of the people who uses Adblock is because it brings much better experience in browsing. And that is mostly because the web loads much faster, and the browser is much more responsive.
We change from 2 - 6 Mbps ADSL to 10s / 100s or even Gigabit Fibre, we moved from Single to Quad Core / Thread, 2GB to now mostly 4/8GB Memory, and order of magnitude faster with SSD. Software improvements, much better OS etc...
And yet the web is still slow, very slow compared to the technological improvement we have.
So how would a normal user do / think, Anything that is moving, distracting, or have a sense of constantly running, i.e Ads, they blame those. And Since there are likely many of those running, what else to blame that is slowing down the web?
> The alternative to ads alongside my content is ads inside my content.
I love ads "inside" my content when they are done right.
The most effective advertising for me is when an author I like to read recommends a product by directly writing about it because they were paid to do so and they like to use the product. Ad blockers don't block these because they aren't ads, they show up inline with the rest of the author's content (and the author acknowledges it was a sponsored posting).
I am completely happy with this model. The whole reason I read an author is because I like her style and opinion. So a recommendation from her, as long as she genuinely likes the product, is actually interesting to me.
The same goes for video: algorithmically determined video ads at the start or within video content are rubbish and I will block them. But the presenters themselves recommending something in-line I am totally open to watching.
There are other alternatives to "ads alongside my content" that don't involve "more obnoxious ads".
I make a webcomic. Historically, that's very much an ad-supported medium. I also block ads aggressively; it's one of the reasons I hassle with jailbreaking my iThings.
I put my adblocking mouth where my money is: as long as I'm getting enough money per new page of comics on Patreon, I don't have any ads on my current project. It's been great to not have anything trying to distract people from reading my content. Sometime next year, as the Patreon income rises, I'll turn off ads on all my comics, new or old. There's no paywall; anyone who wants to read my comic can do this for free, with no ads thanks to the generosity of my supporters.
Obviously it's easier for one person to make enough money via the donation box than it is for a large company; this does not necessarily scale. But it's an option worth considering. And hell, it can work on a larger scale - if you're old enough to remember a time before cable, or if you listen to the radio in the car, you may be familiar with the yearly donation drives on your local public tv/radio station; you may even be a supporter. Or hell: last year when an algorithm change at Google resulted in a lot less drive-by traffic to Metafilter, they started taking donations from their regular userbase. It has ended up being a significant portion of their income; https://metatalk.metafilter.com/23721/State-of-Metafilter-an...
(Yes, I am also aware that I am arguably stealing from all the people whose ads I block without supporting them. I've made my peace with that moral quandary. I fast-forwarded over the commercials when I used to watch stuff on TV, too.)
The problem are not ads, but certain kinds of ads.
Bad ads: CPU intensive ads and privacy inversive "personalised" ads that follow you around
Solution: Show us simple text or picture based banner ads with ad content related to the website topic and pay the website owner a reasonable money per 1000 views/impressions called CPM.
AdBlocker should block only the bad ads, and keep the static non inversive ads. Remember as soon as browser vendors blocked the annoying popups the ads industry had to change their ads format. It's time that browser vendors initiate another such forced change. Though blocking all ads is a bad solution, as an internet without ads means probably a bad web walled garden paywall experience - a lose lose situation.
If ads weren't as intrusive as they can be (ie pop-ups, pop unders, auto-played video adverts with audio enable etc) I wouldn't mind them, but when you impose on my expectancy of what a website should work like or behave like then I need to block your advertisements. Otherwise, I would happily allow your ads. Some websites ruin my experience overall, not only do I now have to go out of my way to scour the screen but now I'm ignoring whatever it was I came to your website to begin with, usually at that point I close the website never to return.
I find the current state of ad services to be morally wrong; therefore, I do not feel bad about using an adblocker. I wouldn't be opposed to tasteful, cookie-less ads that don't attempt to track people around the internet and mine their data. I realize that people need to be paid for their time and content, but maybe there is a better way to manage, serve, and present the ads.
It would also be nice if people could decided on a sane and logical system of standard ad sizes, because the current standards are ridiculous and awkward.
This is a fantastic development for users. That being said, hopefully you can permit me being a grouch:
Apple hasn't done this entirely out of the goodness of their own hearts. After all, this isn't going to filter ads in native apps, is it? If you're a site that relies on ad revenue you've just been given another reason to live in app-land, not web-land.
Imagine you're a publisher. With one OS release Apple has provided the ability to block ads on the web and Apple News, a charming new platform for you to publish your articles, complete with iAd integration. Which one are you going to prioritise?
Not that this is an either-or thing: just like Google vacuums up your personal data and gives you Google Now in return, Apple will push publishers towards iOS apps while also giving you a great web experience.
As a longtime iOS user browsing the web keeps getting worse.
These are getting bigger, they're more resource intensive thanks to 'waterfall' design. They push up my data usage.
They spam open the App Store, and are all around broken. Recently I can't watch videos on some sites because ads elsewhere on the page grab the click and pop a new tab open.
They take longer to load than the real content. Then they MOVE the real content AFTER I STARTED READING because it took them that long to load.
I've used a Flash blocked on my laptop for years, but I didn't used to care about blocking on iOS because it wasn't a problem.
That has ABSOLUTELY changed in the last year or two. Reader mode used to fix sites but as they do more stupid JS trickery that often doesn't work.
I keep running across articles I literally CAN NOT read on my phone due to these kinds of issues.
Ignore iAds and Goigle and privacy (all good points). This is starting to seriously degrade my iOS experience and I'm not surprised Apple was moved to do it.
Apple hasn't done this entirely out of the goodness of their own hearts.
Of course not. Read the article (or spend a few moments considering the consumer tech coprorate landscape), and it's obvoiusly also an assault on Google.
"An Apple realist might argue that its great rival Google makes more than 90 percent of its revenue from online advertising — a growing share of that on mobile, and a large share of that on iPhone. Indeed, Google alone makes about half of all global mobile advertising revenue. So anything that cuts back on mobile advertising revenue is primarily hurting its rival."
The thought that it's part of a long-game play positioning Apple within the content space also comes to mind.
Anything that stops the obnoxious redirects to the App Store would be awesome. I started turning off JS on mobile today simply because most news sites I read had become unusable. This is great news and an ideal way to punish publishers that bombard my experience with giant turds. I will gladly pay for content that doesn't suck.
Apple is a for-profit corporation. Its purpose is to make money and it's very good at it.
That said, let me off a non-cynical motivation: remaining competitive. Many users want to block ads, and blocking most web ads on Android is fairly easy even without root. Firefox users can just install an extension. Chrome users need to configure the local-proxy based version of ABP. It's a minor hassle, but my mother uses it, so anyone moderately tech-savvy can too.
"Apple hasn't done this entirely out of the goodness of their own hearts. After all, this isn't going to filter ads in native apps, is it? If you're a site that relies on ad revenue you've just been given another reason to live in app-land, not web-land."
It's a very nice way to capture Apple's share of revenue generated by ios users clicking on ads in the browser.
The new thing they're trying is what you could call "gross-bait" ads, one gem that comes to mind is the girl's legs with indentations in them and white things coming out.
I'm not even sure they're selling anything anymore, most web ads seem more like psychological warfare.
How about a subscription service - and it could be a voluntary honor system thing - where you pay something each month and it gets distributed to websites you visit, and in order for a site to register with the service they have to forgo advertising. I'd pay $10 a month to do my part to rid the world of web ads. Somebody steal that idea.
Have you seen the Acceptable Advertising manifesto [1]? Sites like reddit and stack exchange have signed up. Essentially AdblockPlus one of the big two adblocking plugins has this manifesto where ads are not garbage, animated, annoying etc. won't be blocked.
My guess is that so many users installed adblockers because of obnoxious ads on a few websites they visit without realising that it removes the non-annoying 'acceptable ads' that support the sites they love. Hopefully something like the acceptable ads manifesto will help stem the tide of quite frankly shitty ads .
This is fundamentally a usability problem. One of the main reasons I use ad blockers is invasive web advertising often forces more mousing/tapping. Due to many many years of constant keyboard/mouse I have enough RSI discomfort these days that extra mousing/tapping is very noticeable.
I can imagine a world without advertising quite easily. If you could snap your fingers and make all advertising disappear the world would be a better place. Sure, TV and Radio would disappear, but who needs it? I stopped listening to Radio years ago,and people are fleeing from TV in droves. I remember the internet before the "make a buck off the internet" crowd showed up. They can all fall out as far as I'm concerned. The beauty of the internet is that you don't have to see advertising if you don't want to. And if the day comes when it can't be avoided I'm turning it off. Wouldn't miss what the internet has become now anyway, just another form of TV.
No ads would mean you will have to pay per page view like in MicrosoftNetwork/MSN95 (Bill Gates plan of the "information highway" that failed in 1995 thanks to the free internet), and Teletext based systems from the 1980s like BTX in Germany.
There is one positive aspect of ads on the internet. They provide an initial cash flow for start ups, where the consumers do not yet see the value proposition of the product/website. Sadly the transition for ad driven to user supported almost never happen.
If you even listen to the No Agenda podcast, which is 100% listener supported, you'd know how hard it can be to get people to pay, even for a product they love.
Here's what's going to happen. Just a little while longer: nothing. As soon as one big party will try to make a significant impact on the ads market (more than 20% at once), a big shift will happen, uniting Publishers all around and shutting adblocking visitors out completely in a coordinated manner. Just like Microsoft's opt-out only DNT-Field, the tide will quickly turn against Apple, as soon as you can't read 50% of all web pages anymore because ads are blocked by default (or a majority). Same thing with this Filter startup that wants to block ads on a mobile provider level (forgot the name). As soon as people realize that all the stuff on the internet isn't "free", but ad financed, they will finally have to make the real choice themselves by opting in or paying.
I think it's more likely that ad networks will come up with a way for publishers to start serving the ads from their own domains and with randomized filenames etc. You can't block ads if you can't differentiate them from the content in an automated way.
Publishers have been brainwashed that everything must have: an ad, a tracking widget, and a user survey. Oh, and each page gets ten of those elements and each element comes from 3 to 5 unique externally hosted providers.
Have you tried browsing popular sites on an iPad? Every 3rd site has an ad unit that ejects you to the App Store to download a freemium game. It's insane. Block those advertisers and never look back. (Yes, Apple shouldn't easily allow eject-to-app-store from a Safari tab, but they also want users to be able to click-to-go-to-appstore on demand. It's a hacky abuse of javascript by ad networks to simulate false user intent.)
Since all of those elements are "as a service" you just block the invading services and all is well again.
I would think that the people savvy enough to install 3rd party ad blocking extensions are smart enough to know that the issue is their extension. Not Apple. But who knows.
Haha there is no way this would come to fruition. Users, on average, abandon websites within 10 seconds or less. 10 SECONDS! If someone blocked out the page because of an ad blocker the user will go to it, not see the content they wanted, and leave less likely to return.
There are some problems with this theory though. (a) On average iOS users have more disposable income than Android users, (b) iOS users have shown a proclivity for spending that money on mobile content and (c) iOS are responsible for more web traffic than Android.
So if publishers adopt a freemium model (the most common) and they present a crappy experience to users who block ads then they won't be willing to buy a subscription. That's why most websites today don't punish users who block ads and that position will likely continue on mobile as well.
Maybe I can finally load a website on mobile in less than two minutes. Maybe I can finally load websites without my entire browser freezing for several minutes while a zillion Javascript scripts all fight it out. Maybe I can finally switch a tab and switch back without the entire website having to reload because all the Javascript wants a new set of ads.
All of this could have been avoided if you loaded my content FIRST and then filled in the ad placeholders SECOND. But, noooooo, ads are more important than content so my screen jumps around, my browser freezes, and my tabs reload and reload and reload and reload.
Interesting that, at the same time, Apple is actively promoting iAds for people to monetize its new news service. On the one hand, if you have to have ads, it's probably better to have an ad platform under your control (where you can enforce privacy and safeguard against performance issues), but it's still not ideal (slippery slope later on?). I wonder if Apple's News app takes off if, at a later date, they could introduce a paid tier Spotify-style to let people read its news content without ads, and distribute the funds accordingly to news providers who've signed up for it?
I am sympathetic to content creators making money, but I don't think the trade offs in privacy are worth it. For example, a recent Wired article about Apple's WWDC[0] pleas with the user to "do us a solid" and whitelist their site in their adblocker. Sadly, whitelisting that site in uBlock actually does 28 sites a solid[1]. What's worse, their site doesn't even use HTTPS, so how can I trust the code I get from them?
I’ve started running a local instance of dnsmasq that returns NXDOMAIN for a giant list of ad servers. For anything not in the list, it tosses the request up to the real DNS server. I’ve found it to be a simple and effective way to block lots of ads for all local network traffic.
I wish there was a service that integrated with the major ad networks that allowed you to pay money not to be show ads. Something were the majority goes to the owners of the websites who's ads you're blocking.
Tech/media companies dependent on advertising should just adapt. As techies told a complaining music industry, just do concerts and sell t-shirts. Now maybe this won't be as profitable as the current business model, and maybe the industry will be smaller and more consolidated, but that's capitalism. No one guaranteed you would keep growing and making more money.
Perhaps you'll have to stop using third-party ad networks and start selling and creating your own ads. Native ads like Buzzfeed's sponsored posts could work. It'll probably require more capital and won't scale as well, but you'll just have to deal with that.
I think everybody is missing the point here. Content blockers are nice for ad blocking, but an even better use case here is websites knowing whether or not you have their mobile app installed.
Imagine a website that has an "Install our app" script that normally runs when you view it on mobile, but that script gets blocked by their own app when it's installed on your device. With a bit of creativity, you can do even cooler things than that once you think about content blockers like this.
It's kind of the inverse of extensions, where websites can define various extensions that are enabled or disabled accordingly by your installed apps.
I'm not sure I understand why Adblock still works? I mean, how can it be so reliable in detecting ads?
If I had a site with ads I'd try to make them as unobtrusive as possible and indistinguishable from my own content. A sidebar of images with urls only from my own domain. If an ad network is used to serve those images it can be proxies through my servers. There has to be some technical reason why this isn't the standard way of doing it (for example that it breaks advanced tracking, or that Adblock detects the actual contents).
I don't think a combo of dns aliasing to the ad network, plus better embedding ads in the dom to make them look like a site's regular content, plus random ordering of news and ads to prevent any kind of static css rules matching can be countered.
Now of course that means ads will require a bit more work to integrate to a website, and probably move integration deeper in the server side, but technicaly i don't see any major issues. Am I missing something ?
This is interesting. Does Googles mobile chrome browser have something similar on Android? I'm not really a huge fan of advertising but this seems like a feature that would make a certain group of users choose one browser over another and I can't really see Google not adding mobile plugins to allow this as some point.
Did Google recently say that most of their mobile ad revenue comes from iOS users? I could see this prompting a Apple/Google cold war that would go as far as iOS including ad blocking by default in a few years.
May be it's a good thing for the news/media industry. Why rely on flimsy ads. If your news contents are credible and important to users they'll subscribe to it a la Netflix or HBO Go.
[+] [-] unholiness|10 years ago|reply
There is a huge irony in that fact that AdBlock's function of keeping ads away from our content will eventually do the opposite. The alternative to ads alongside my content is ads inside my content.
Let's face it: paywalls don't work. The alternative on the horizon is native advertising. Buzzfeed is now famously refusing to host ads. Instead they sustain themselves by publishing content that subtly supports the agenda of any company with deep enough pockets to pay for it. A viewer's ability to distinguish between native ads and regular articles is small and quickly vanishing. If separate ads stop reaching people, the path to monetization remaining is to change your content to reflect someone else's agenda.
I keep AdBlock off by default because I prefer a world where creators can make a meaningful articles and a useful apps without caring about who they are supporting, and can, as the price tag, separately attach an ad.
I do see it as a moral issue. There are good people making content that's being sustained by ads. I am never going to remember to give them my modicum of support if I don't consider them innocent until proven guilty. It's worth the small annoyance. It's worth the 2 seconds it takes to turn it on for the problematic pages. Hell, you can even map it to a shortcut[1]. It sucks, but the alternative is positively bleak.
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TL;DR: The bathroom may be dirty, but at least no one's taking a shit in my kitchen.
[1] https://adblockplus.org/en/faq_customization#shortcuts
[+] [-] belorn|10 years ago|reply
Consented advertisement, on the other hand, is having a great time. More stores are now using club memberships for advertisements, and when Facebook started to only send out a fraction of news letters, some customers went and asked where their news letters has gone. People are actively seeking where their consented advertisement are when it is being blocked.
I find taking a moral stand in the name of non-consented advertisement to be a bit sad. They had their chance with do-not-track and they collectively decided to ignore consent. Instead of taking a step back, they doubled down on being more intrusive and anti-consumer. Now they've got to live with the consequences, while companies reroute money to consented advertisements.
[+] [-] hyperbovine|10 years ago|reply
A false dichotomy if ever there was one. "Paywals" worked in literally every single other sector of the economy for all of recorded human history (I know, I know, who can remember that brief ~6000 year interlude between the Sumerians and the Internet!) The continue to work at your local dry cleaner, grocery store, Home Depot, etc. Really everything that doesn't require a browser. There are all sorts of moral, social, economic, and environmental reasons to be opposed to advertising. I keep AdBlock on by default because I dream of a day when I can pay Google a decent sum of money each month in return for their service.
[+] [-] eeeeeeeeeeeee|10 years ago|reply
Buzzfeed is a poor example; it's just garbage content that is being re-circulated by many different places. There are TONS of sites that have paywalls and/or ads on their sites and their writing is still compromised. So I think paying for content and getting advertisements out of good content is the solution to restore independence, but the price point needs to be right.
I hate blocking ads (I whitelist sites I visit frequently with reasonable ads) but ads have become obnoxious, so AdBlock is a natural reaction to site owners treating users like shit. Sadly, a lot of reasonable sites with unobtrusive ads have gotten caught up in blacklists.
I would pay for good news content if I could pay for a bundle of good content at a fair price. Even something like the NY Times is a hard sell; it feels weird given the wealth of sources and information we have access to these days. NY Times is a great source, but I don't want to only read a single source. And it quickly becomes unaffordable if you want to pay for a lot of sources of information.
Spotify and similar providers solved this with music and I still think a better solution will come out eventually for news. There are a lot of people that want to pay a fair price for good content, but the current options are not very good.
[+] [-] ksec|10 years ago|reply
We change from 2 - 6 Mbps ADSL to 10s / 100s or even Gigabit Fibre, we moved from Single to Quad Core / Thread, 2GB to now mostly 4/8GB Memory, and order of magnitude faster with SSD. Software improvements, much better OS etc...
And yet the web is still slow, very slow compared to the technological improvement we have.
So how would a normal user do / think, Anything that is moving, distracting, or have a sense of constantly running, i.e Ads, they blame those. And Since there are likely many of those running, what else to blame that is slowing down the web?
[+] [-] interpol_p|10 years ago|reply
I love ads "inside" my content when they are done right.
The most effective advertising for me is when an author I like to read recommends a product by directly writing about it because they were paid to do so and they like to use the product. Ad blockers don't block these because they aren't ads, they show up inline with the rest of the author's content (and the author acknowledges it was a sponsored posting).
I am completely happy with this model. The whole reason I read an author is because I like her style and opinion. So a recommendation from her, as long as she genuinely likes the product, is actually interesting to me.
The same goes for video: algorithmically determined video ads at the start or within video content are rubbish and I will block them. But the presenters themselves recommending something in-line I am totally open to watching.
[+] [-] egypturnash|10 years ago|reply
I make a webcomic. Historically, that's very much an ad-supported medium. I also block ads aggressively; it's one of the reasons I hassle with jailbreaking my iThings.
I put my adblocking mouth where my money is: as long as I'm getting enough money per new page of comics on Patreon, I don't have any ads on my current project. It's been great to not have anything trying to distract people from reading my content. Sometime next year, as the Patreon income rises, I'll turn off ads on all my comics, new or old. There's no paywall; anyone who wants to read my comic can do this for free, with no ads thanks to the generosity of my supporters.
Obviously it's easier for one person to make enough money via the donation box than it is for a large company; this does not necessarily scale. But it's an option worth considering. And hell, it can work on a larger scale - if you're old enough to remember a time before cable, or if you listen to the radio in the car, you may be familiar with the yearly donation drives on your local public tv/radio station; you may even be a supporter. Or hell: last year when an algorithm change at Google resulted in a lot less drive-by traffic to Metafilter, they started taking donations from their regular userbase. It has ended up being a significant portion of their income; https://metatalk.metafilter.com/23721/State-of-Metafilter-an...
(Yes, I am also aware that I am arguably stealing from all the people whose ads I block without supporting them. I've made my peace with that moral quandary. I fast-forwarded over the commercials when I used to watch stuff on TV, too.)
[+] [-] frik|10 years ago|reply
Bad ads: CPU intensive ads and privacy inversive "personalised" ads that follow you around
Solution: Show us simple text or picture based banner ads with ad content related to the website topic and pay the website owner a reasonable money per 1000 views/impressions called CPM.
AdBlocker should block only the bad ads, and keep the static non inversive ads. Remember as soon as browser vendors blocked the annoying popups the ads industry had to change their ads format. It's time that browser vendors initiate another such forced change. Though blocking all ads is a bad solution, as an internet without ads means probably a bad web walled garden paywall experience - a lose lose situation.
[+] [-] giancarlostoro|10 years ago|reply
I'm all for non-intrusive advertisements.
[+] [-] sprokolopolis|10 years ago|reply
It would also be nice if people could decided on a sane and logical system of standard ad sizes, because the current standards are ridiculous and awkward.
[+] [-] untog|10 years ago|reply
Apple hasn't done this entirely out of the goodness of their own hearts. After all, this isn't going to filter ads in native apps, is it? If you're a site that relies on ad revenue you've just been given another reason to live in app-land, not web-land.
Imagine you're a publisher. With one OS release Apple has provided the ability to block ads on the web and Apple News, a charming new platform for you to publish your articles, complete with iAd integration. Which one are you going to prioritise?
Not that this is an either-or thing: just like Google vacuums up your personal data and gives you Google Now in return, Apple will push publishers towards iOS apps while also giving you a great web experience.
[+] [-] MBCook|10 years ago|reply
These are getting bigger, they're more resource intensive thanks to 'waterfall' design. They push up my data usage.
They spam open the App Store, and are all around broken. Recently I can't watch videos on some sites because ads elsewhere on the page grab the click and pop a new tab open.
They take longer to load than the real content. Then they MOVE the real content AFTER I STARTED READING because it took them that long to load.
I've used a Flash blocked on my laptop for years, but I didn't used to care about blocking on iOS because it wasn't a problem.
That has ABSOLUTELY changed in the last year or two. Reader mode used to fix sites but as they do more stupid JS trickery that often doesn't work.
I keep running across articles I literally CAN NOT read on my phone due to these kinds of issues.
Ignore iAds and Goigle and privacy (all good points). This is starting to seriously degrade my iOS experience and I'm not surprised Apple was moved to do it.
[+] [-] dredmorbius|10 years ago|reply
Of course not. Read the article (or spend a few moments considering the consumer tech coprorate landscape), and it's obvoiusly also an assault on Google.
"An Apple realist might argue that its great rival Google makes more than 90 percent of its revenue from online advertising — a growing share of that on mobile, and a large share of that on iPhone. Indeed, Google alone makes about half of all global mobile advertising revenue. So anything that cuts back on mobile advertising revenue is primarily hurting its rival."
The thought that it's part of a long-game play positioning Apple within the content space also comes to mind.
[+] [-] briandear|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zak|10 years ago|reply
That said, let me off a non-cynical motivation: remaining competitive. Many users want to block ads, and blocking most web ads on Android is fairly easy even without root. Firefox users can just install an extension. Chrome users need to configure the local-proxy based version of ABP. It's a minor hassle, but my mother uses it, so anyone moderately tech-savvy can too.
[+] [-] Sideloader|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PretzelFisch|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] niccaluim|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hellbanTHIS|10 years ago|reply
I'm not even sure they're selling anything anymore, most web ads seem more like psychological warfare.
How about a subscription service - and it could be a voluntary honor system thing - where you pay something each month and it gets distributed to websites you visit, and in order for a site to register with the service they have to forgo advertising. I'd pay $10 a month to do my part to rid the world of web ads. Somebody steal that idea.
[+] [-] specialk|10 years ago|reply
My guess is that so many users installed adblockers because of obnoxious ads on a few websites they visit without realising that it removes the non-annoying 'acceptable ads' that support the sites they love. Hopefully something like the acceptable ads manifesto will help stem the tide of quite frankly shitty ads .
[1] https://acceptableads.org/
[+] [-] jsz0|10 years ago|reply
This is fundamentally a usability problem. One of the main reasons I use ad blockers is invasive web advertising often forces more mousing/tapping. Due to many many years of constant keyboard/mouse I have enough RSI discomfort these days that extra mousing/tapping is very noticeable.
[+] [-] Nursie|10 years ago|reply
It's mind pollution and the world would be better without it.
[+] [-] oldpond|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frik|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jgmmo|10 years ago|reply
Can't content creators monetize their shows with other methods than third-party ads? Like selling their own goods and services?
[+] [-] mrweasel|10 years ago|reply
If you even listen to the No Agenda podcast, which is 100% listener supported, you'd know how hard it can be to get people to pay, even for a product they love.
[+] [-] blumkvist|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] endymi0n|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] modeless|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seiji|10 years ago|reply
Publishers have been brainwashed that everything must have: an ad, a tracking widget, and a user survey. Oh, and each page gets ten of those elements and each element comes from 3 to 5 unique externally hosted providers.
Have you tried browsing popular sites on an iPad? Every 3rd site has an ad unit that ejects you to the App Store to download a freemium game. It's insane. Block those advertisers and never look back. (Yes, Apple shouldn't easily allow eject-to-app-store from a Safari tab, but they also want users to be able to click-to-go-to-appstore on demand. It's a hacky abuse of javascript by ad networks to simulate false user intent.)
Since all of those elements are "as a service" you just block the invading services and all is well again.
[+] [-] hn_user2|10 years ago|reply
I would think that the people savvy enough to install 3rd party ad blocking extensions are smart enough to know that the issue is their extension. Not Apple. But who knows.
[+] [-] BinaryIdiot|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] facepalm|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guntars|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] threeseed|10 years ago|reply
So if publishers adopt a freemium model (the most common) and they present a crappy experience to users who block ads then they won't be willing to buy a subscription. That's why most websites today don't punish users who block ads and that position will likely continue on mobile as well.
[+] [-] bsder|10 years ago|reply
Maybe I can finally load a website on mobile in less than two minutes. Maybe I can finally load websites without my entire browser freezing for several minutes while a zillion Javascript scripts all fight it out. Maybe I can finally switch a tab and switch back without the entire website having to reload because all the Javascript wants a new set of ads.
All of this could have been avoided if you loaded my content FIRST and then filled in the ad placeholders SECOND. But, noooooo, ads are more important than content so my screen jumps around, my browser freezes, and my tabs reload and reload and reload and reload.
Fuck 'em.
[+] [-] Osmium|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cwyers|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aorth|10 years ago|reply
[0] http://www.wired.com/2015/06/same-plans-tech/
[1] https://imgur.com/nqUQsML
[+] [-] Nursie|10 years ago|reply
In the UK we have the BBC, with no ads. I pay for Netflix and NowTv, so I can watch movies and tv with no ads. I pay for spotify and get no ads.
For the web I run adblock on as many devices as I can because I hate them. I am perfectly happy to have this detected and my access blocked.
I'd go as far as setting a 'will not render' header in my http requests if that made it even easier.
I don't want to rip anyone off but neither do I want branded brain-pollution.
[+] [-] egwynn|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guelo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] learc83|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pasta_2|10 years ago|reply
Perhaps you'll have to stop using third-party ad networks and start selling and creating your own ads. Native ads like Buzzfeed's sponsored posts could work. It'll probably require more capital and won't scale as well, but you'll just have to deal with that.
[+] [-] guptaneil|10 years ago|reply
Imagine a website that has an "Install our app" script that normally runs when you view it on mobile, but that script gets blocked by their own app when it's installed on your device. With a bit of creativity, you can do even cooler things than that once you think about content blockers like this.
It's kind of the inverse of extensions, where websites can define various extensions that are enabled or disabled accordingly by your installed apps.
[+] [-] alkonaut|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsaul|10 years ago|reply
Now of course that means ads will require a bit more work to integrate to a website, and probably move integration deeper in the server side, but technicaly i don't see any major issues. Am I missing something ?
[+] [-] joeblau|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emehrkay|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dj_doh|10 years ago|reply