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An Hour with Safari Content Blocker in iOS 9

murphyapps.co

41–50 of 74 posts

Re: An Hour with Safari Content Blocker in iOS 9

#41

I really think a kind of lightweight collective bargaining is the answer here. The way it works is simple. You install an ad blocker, let's call it QBlock. Then, QBlock goes to the websites and the ad networks to negotiate. If you want to reach our 1M users with your ads, you have to play ball with us. e.g. * Keep ads to 15% of screen space * Don't autoplay audio * Don't exceed 15% of network traffic * etc. If you co…

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Re: An Hour with Safari Content Blocker in iOS 9

#42

I really think a kind of lightweight collective bargaining is the answer here. The way it works is simple. You install an ad blocker, let's call it QBlock. Then, QBlock goes to the websites and the ad networks to negotiate. If you want to reach our 1M users with your ads, you have to play ball with us. e.g. * Keep ads to 15% of screen space * Don't autoplay audio * Don't exceed 15% of network traffic * etc. If you co…

Alternately, an existing social network or reader like Flipboard could implement micropayments. At one time, https://flattr.com had linked Twitter favorites to donations, before Twitter blocked them and never implemented an equivalent service. A monthly recurring "subscription"/donation could be micro-disbursed by the social network.

Re: An Hour with Safari Content Blocker in iOS 9

#43
post #39
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple isn't doing this to save the web, they are doing this so developers will be forced to create a native app to show ads and make some money. Easiest way to show ads in a native app on iOS... oh wouldn't that be iAd service in which Apple gets a cut of the profit?

I really don't get your point, with a native app the developer has full control of what is being shown, if anything ad ad-blocker would steer users more towards a clean web browers than an ad infested native app. As a real world example, the (otherwise excellent) Twitch app on iOs serves unskippable minute long video ads with an annoying frequency, so much that I often prefer using the service through an ad-blocking…

I think neor (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9776826)'s point is the intended impact on developers, not on users. I believe that the contention is that Apple hopes to coerce developers—or, rather, content providers—into taking down public-facing web portals that are out of Apple's control, where their ad revenue will plummet, and creating instead an app that is to some extent under Apple's control, because that will become the only effective way to get ad revenue. Your choice as a user will then go away; there are already some, though fortunately not yet many, sites that must be accessed through apps (for example, my bank accepts deposits only through their app).

(I'm not endorsing this point of view myself, although it sounds more than a bit plausible to me; it's just, I think, what was being said.)

Re: An Hour with Safari Content Blocker in iOS 9

#44
post #41

I really think a kind of lightweight collective bargaining is the answer here. The way it works is simple. You install an ad blocker, let's call it QBlock. Then, QBlock goes to the websites and the ad networks to negotiate. If you want to reach our 1M users with your ads, you have to play ball with us. e.g. * Keep ads to 15% of screen space * Don't autoplay audio * Don't exceed 15% of network traffic * etc. If you co…

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Re: An Hour with Safari Content Blocker in iOS 9

#45
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the author hits on something here. It's not the ads that bother me, it's that they are destructive to my time, bandwidth, and battery. It's the equivalent of walking into a furniture store and being followed around by a salesperson who won't respect your personal space and berates you verbally if you don't buy immediately. Even better, if you've ever visited a city/country with a bad tout culture (like Luxor,…

The analogy breaks down a little bit because you aren't just shopping, you are getting the product, and the price of that product is listening to the salesperson. So the situation is probably closer to sitting through a timeshare presentation to get something free, although online you are not forced to pay attention to the ad for any amount of time.

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Re: An Hour with Safari Content Blocker in iOS 9

#46
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the author hits on something here. It's not the ads that bother me, it's that they are destructive to my time, bandwidth, and battery. It's the equivalent of walking into a furniture store and being followed around by a salesperson who won't respect your personal space and berates you verbally if you don't buy immediately. Even better, if you've ever visited a city/country with a bad tout culture (like Luxor,…

The analogy breaks down a little bit because you aren't just shopping, you are getting the product, and the price of that product is listening to the salesperson. So the situation is probably closer to sitting through a timeshare presentation to get something free, although online you are not forced to pay attention to the ad for any amount of time.

An alternative to blocking all ads would be blocking based on risk. We could have open blacklists or JSON content-blocking rules for different ad/content categories, including business models. Blocking extensions could optionally notify sites of tagged categories which are whitelisted.

Re: An Hour with Safari Content Blocker in iOS 9

#47
On my old iPad 2 I use "Weblock" which blocks most ads and makes browsing on Safari bearable...

Apparently it sets up a "Proxy Auto Configuration" that has a blacklist, any ads get routed to > /dev/null (but its not a VPN, I think its the same approach as uBlock but not sure)

Anyway not affiliated at all but find it very useful on iOS...

Re: An Hour with Safari Content Blocker in iOS 9

#48
Sure, Apple may have reasons to do this to hit Google where it may sting some and also seemingly putting more effort in their own search. Additionally, it may be a reason to increase the incentive of getting products off web ads and more into their own eco systems of apps.

All this while getting applauses from end users who reap the benefit of ultimately getting a better user experience.

Apple is in a position to pull this off. Is it evil? Well...

No matter what - this has the potential of forcing more innovation around ad related business models. Especially since so many products (especially news/journalism) rely on a business model (ads) that is largely in conflict with their product (getting people to consume news). More innovation around "native advertisement" where the ad offer is actually something adding value to the end user rather than distracting from the core product. Hopefully...

Re: An Hour with Safari Content Blocker in iOS 9

#49
post #32

"Now, this was fun little project to mess around with, but it does give me a moral dilemma. Do I care more about my privacy, time, device battery life & data usage or do I care more about the content creators of sites I visit to be able to monetise effectively and ultimately keep creating content?" Once we show content creators that we're willing to block their unsupervised invasions en masse, they'll come back to us…

The content creators has a dilemma too. Without ads, no money. The party who can solve that are the ad networks. We need a disruptive ad provider that offers non-shitty ads (like ads before the Flash era) and pays reasonable ad-money. Blocking all ads is bad for everyone in the long run. Adblockers should block only the bad players like Antivirus blocks bad players.

Like the original Google ads? Before they bought DoubleClick, they were just plain text and people actually liked them.

Or, better yet, reddit ads. Honestly, I feel like I'm missing out when I turn reddit ads off, so I don't do that anymore: they make an excellent subreddit discovery engine, so they're actually useful to me.

Re: An Hour with Safari Content Blocker in iOS 9

#50
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the author hits on something here. It's not the ads that bother me, it's that they are destructive to my time, bandwidth, and battery. It's the equivalent of walking into a furniture store and being followed around by a salesperson who won't respect your personal space and berates you verbally if you don't buy immediately. Even better, if you've ever visited a city/country with a bad tout culture (like Luxor,…

The analogy breaks down a little bit because you aren't just shopping, you are getting the product, and the price of that product is listening to the salesperson. So the situation is probably closer to sitting through a timeshare presentation to get something free, although online you are not forced to pay attention to the ad for any amount of time.

Fair enough. It seems that most timeshare deals have figured out the balance of pitch to product though. The internet, however, is filled with hack jobs that make your page take 11 seconds to load. It's like the timeshare guy that keeps grabbing your shirt when he wants your attention.
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