I am proud to say that I will never download the Apple News app.
“This story is being previewed exclusively on Apple News until Tuesday”
221–230 of 241 posts
Re: “This story is being previewed exclusively on Apple News until Tuesday”
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's almost certain that Apple's long game is to make this the norm. If there's one surefire way to get people addicted to ad blockers, it's to make them available on mobile devices. Once enough content creators start moving content behind News-walls, then Apple can roll out desktop versions of News. And as people then start asking each other "how do I get ad blocking in my browser as well," Apple's well positioned t…
Can't a simple solution be: websites detect if their ads are being blocked (by iOS9 or whatever) and blur their content until the user disables the adblock?
The only way you'd ever get users to disable their ad blockers on your website would be injecting them with a fast-acting poison and publishing directions to the antidote. If a regular publisher of article-based content tried this, they would just end up with no readers.
Re: “This story is being previewed exclusively on Apple News until Tuesday”
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
Penalize the site or the story? Should Google keep it out of search until it shows up on the "greater" web or are you advocating punishing the whole site because they have some content exclusively walled for a certain amount of time?
The whole site. The site is in the best position to know what is publicly available and which is within the walled garden and should adjust their robots.txt or spider responses to match. You pee in the pool, you have to take a time out.
The one issue I have with that thought (without putting much thought into it myself) is the conflict of interest. By punishing Wired, Google is saying that the only approved (by Google) income stream is through advertising (Google's main revenue stream) and that other types of creative partnerships may lead to websites being downlinked (and downranking past the 1st or 2nd page is almost equivalent to delisting).
That line of thinking also begs the question whether only freely accessible information should come up on web searches, which would rule out any links to many professional journals which survive by subscription and/or fees per article. If you're punishing Wired for putting articles behind walled garden then it makes sense to punish all walled gardens and Google search becomes a search engine cataloging only free articles.
Re: “This story is being previewed exclusively on Apple News until Tuesday”
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eternal September? The internet was still great from that regard (tons of people "not producing content for money"), no big central control, no FB/Google/Twitter/etc, until around the time we got Google. There was AOL of course, but that was mostly mocked by people on the "real" internet. > and while this would certainly be a regression for the society at large Actually, it might be a huge improvement. Technofiles wi…
> The internet was still great ... until around the time we got Google. Correlation but not necessarily causation.
I wasn't going for causation (or even correlation). Just to convey the general time frame.
Re: “This story is being previewed exclusively on Apple News until Tuesday”
#225This could backfire. Surely this should result in a Google penalty against Wired.com for publishing thin content? https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604719?hl=en If Wired wants the article to be exclusive on Apple News, fine, but in that case it should not be on the website. Keep it exclusively on Apple News. There is no content on this page beyond a headline.
The page will not be thin content once the exclusivity expires. Even if Google punished the page in the interim, it would not matter much, because Google drives very little of the initial traffic to articles. Social channels eclipsed it long ago. Google is more important for providing a "thick tail" of traffic after the initial social spike.
Re: “This story is being previewed exclusively on Apple News until Tuesday”
#226I have a silly question: If the conspiracy theorists are right, the whole ad-blocking on ios is a ploy to get the ad-starved publishers, and thus the masses, off the web-based internet and onto in-app content silos such as Apple News. If they're wildly successful, the only ones left on the traditional internet would be those not producing content for money. Does that mean I'll be able to experience the internet the w…
>> If they're wildly successful, the only ones left on the traditional internet would be those not producing content for money.
Well, what it actually means is that folks who monetize their content in ways other than ads could begin to have an advantage. For example, Red Bull Media monetizes their content with drink sales. PBS, NPR, and Think Progress monetize their content with donations.
Re: “This story is being previewed exclusively on Apple News until Tuesday”
#227Re: “This story is being previewed exclusively on Apple News until Tuesday”
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eternal September? The internet was still great from that regard (tons of people "not producing content for money"), no big central control, no FB/Google/Twitter/etc, until around the time we got Google. There was AOL of course, but that was mostly mocked by people on the "real" internet. > and while this would certainly be a regression for the society at large Actually, it might be a huge improvement. Technofiles wi…
> The internet was still great ... until around the time we got Google. Correlation but not necessarily causation.
You have to admit that after establishing its dominance Google started to dictate its own rules for web design, rather than adapting to the pages people already had. Google's algorithm that places incoming links above anything else for relevance is singlehandedly responsible for forum spambots, fake websites, and the dynamic where new websites have no chance to compete with something established, unless they run some kind of marketing campaign to "seed" the links.
Re: “This story is being previewed exclusively on Apple News until Tuesday”
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's almost certain that Apple's long game is to make this the norm. If there's one surefire way to get people addicted to ad blockers, it's to make them available on mobile devices. Once enough content creators start moving content behind News-walls, then Apple can roll out desktop versions of News. And as people then start asking each other "how do I get ad blocking in my browser as well," Apple's well positioned t…
Can't a simple solution be: websites detect if their ads are being blocked (by iOS9 or whatever) and blur their content until the user disables the adblock?
That's certainly an option, but probably not a very useful one. It's like stopping piracy. Piracy can actually have a positive affect on sales. Person A who pirates your software or music doesn't pay you, but they tell other people about it, and some of them, who wouldn't have known about it, do pay for it leading to more sales than you would have otherwise had.
It's the same with content. If I go to read your article and you block it because I'm blocking ads, I'm not going to tell anyone about it and I'm not going to share the link. You then don't get the ad revenue from that sharing, so it's a net loss for you.
(And of course, if I go to read it, and it says I need a special app, I'm also not going to read it or share the link.)
Re: “This story is being previewed exclusively on Apple News until Tuesday”
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Open standards tend to trump closed platforms over time. The opposite is true, and what is happening to the Internet is another example. Telephone, Radio, and Film used to be open but they have since been cornered by cartels. Tim Wu explains this excellently in his book, "The Master Switch."
I don't think that's necessarily the natural direction- as you say, it's just that more powerful players are, in the case of the Internet, now able to push their influence until it results in a monopoly over information. What we are seeing is a result of the failure of our systems- I still believe that open standards will tend to trump closed platforms over time, if they are allowed to.
There is no "natural direction" because the systems, in this context, are not natural. The platforms will only remain open so long as we fight to keep them that way. We're not doing a very good job, either; the Internet is moving to a closed system very rapidly.