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An Hour with Safari Content Blocker in iOS 9

murphyapps.co

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Re: An Hour with Safari Content Blocker in iOS 9

#61

Post by pmontra »

soneil wrote: post #23
0x0 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

App banners are outside the DOM.

I'd be curious to know if it's still possible to block them, however. The banner itself is outside the document, it's a UI element rendered by the client, similar to a toolbar on a desktop client. However, it's invoked by a head/meta element within the document, so it may still be possible (eg, when the document is parsed, this element is invoked, and the filter is invoked - which comes first?) Unfortunately there's…

You need a proxy server that removes the meta tag for the app store from the HTML file.

Re: An Hour with Safari Content Blocker in iOS 9

#62

Post by JustSomeNobody »

hahainternet wrote: post #11

While I usually am fine with Ad blockers, Apple's position here is completely incoherent. They decided not to pay artists for a trial period, they've decided websites don't deserve to advertise. Why it's almost like the only way to deal with Apple users is to sell to them through Apple, and therefore give up at least 30%.

Minor nitpick. I don't believe Apple ever pays artists. The labels pay artists. The labels need to go back to the artists and explain why they chose to allow Apple to forgo payment for 3 mos. Sure, Apple has some culpability in this as they negotiated for it, but the labels pay artists and they need to speak up on why they chose to negotiate with Apple on this.

Re: An Hour with Safari Content Blocker in iOS 9

#63

Post by danmaz74 »

SG- wrote: post #59
danmaz74 wrote: post #56

I wonder what will happen if ad-based content websites will start blocking Safari iOS 9.

Remember what happened to Flash? Turns out there's not only a lot of iOS users out there, but iOS users end up using the web more on their devices in general too. Ideally they should come up with better ads that don't try and take over your entire or system resources (this is even after some extreme JS and display optimizations happening over the years in JS and browsers). Also unless I'm mistaken, this is about putt…

The only way I see to circumvent this "problem" is to have the ads as integral part of the content, indistinguishable from it. I'm not sure if this will make "better ads" though.

Re: An Hour with Safari Content Blocker in iOS 9

#64

Post by tlack »

Sadly, this won't be the end of intrusive advertising. It will just go underground. I think as a result of wide-spread ad blocking we'll see three worrying trends develop.

1. More paid-only content

More content will go behind pay gates and login gates, like the NYT site, as sites scramble to monetize. This is bad for society as a whole as we lose free access to information.

2. Advertising goes server-side

Advertising will become more subtle and not understandable by the end user. The good thing about Javascript-based advertising tags is that you could kind of understand what was going on.

In the future, ads will be indistinguishable from content, and already shaky wall between editorial and advertising will collapse completely.

On top of that, the worst part of modern advertising - data sharing - will be completely unobservable to us. Even small publishers will maintain databases of a wealth of information about you, tied to your logged in email address.

3. The collapse of many cottage hobby websites

You can forget about small blogs being a worthwhile side biz for many small groups. No more dropping in a simple JS ad tag and having some revenue to pay off your hosting bill.

Re: An Hour with Safari Content Blocker in iOS 9

#65

Post by bigethan »

So now that Apple is saying you can't make money on the mobile web with iOS, everyone will have to make an app with unblockable ads. Great for the app store. What happens to discoverability when your content isn't on the mobile web (and with google penalizing you for not having a mobile friendly site)?

Re: An Hour with Safari Content Blocker in iOS 9

#66

Post by joshuapants »

pmontra wrote: post #58
sleepychu wrote: post #28

"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 answer to that question is "it depends". If the author is the kind of person that sometimes clicks on ads, then blocking content will make a difference to those sites. I never clicked ads before discovering AdBlock, so the fact that I've been using it for years now didn't deprive them from any money. Before anybody asks if I gave a chance to ads-filled web sites recently: my tablet doesn't have AdBlock (I run Ope…

> I never clicked ads before discovering AdBlock, so the fact that I've been using it for years now didn't deprive them from any money.

Do all ads rely on clicks? I'm fairly certain that a good number just want to user to see the ad (they probably pay less, though).

I don't disagree with your main idea, and I do use adblockers, but I think it's worth clearing up that point.

Re: An Hour with Safari Content Blocker in iOS 9

#67

Post by joshuapants »

emsy wrote: post #17
e1ven wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is very similar to what Adblock plus did. Many of the users were very unhappy, leading to forks of the project. This policy, for good or ill, annoyed many of the users: https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads Ultimately, it lead to the popular fork: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/adblock-edge/

There was a huge controversy behind the acceptable ads feature. I think an application like "QBlock" would still stand a chance, but it would have to be transparent and enabled for all web users.

I think the biggest part of the controversy was that people speculated it would become "pay us money so our users see your ads" more than "if your ads are acceptable we will unblock them"

Re: An Hour with Safari Content Blocker in iOS 9

#68

Post by slang800 »

tlack wrote: post #64

Sadly, this won't be the end of intrusive advertising. It will just go underground. I think as a result of wide-spread ad blocking we'll see three worrying trends develop. 1. More paid-only content More content will go behind pay gates and login gates, like the NYT site, as sites scramble to monetize. This is bad for society as a whole as we lose free access to information. 2. Advertising goes server-side Advertising…

> In the future, ads will be indistinguishable from content, and [the] already shaky wall between editorial and advertising will collapse completely.

If anything, that should give us even more reason to attack this new form of advertising. Ad-blockers were born out of a pretty mild inconvenience. But hidden ads are far more sinister, and thus - should result in far more people coming up with ways to remove them.

> No more dropping in a simple JS ad tag and having some revenue to pay off your hosting bill.

At this point, hosting is basically free. You can either pay for it with pocket-change (as is the case with S3), or you could host it on GitHub and use GH-Pages, or even host a non-static site on something like 000webhost (I'm sure that there are more free non-static hosts than just 000webhost, but I haven't looked for one in years).

But yeah, it is a shame that people can't make a little cash off of a side project using something like ads. We should come up with a way to fix that... like Flattr or Gittip (Gratipay) have been trying to do.

Re: An Hour with Safari Content Blocker in iOS 9

#69

Post by t0mas88 »

bigethan wrote: post #65

So now that Apple is saying you can't make money on the mobile web with iOS, everyone will have to make an app with unblockable ads. Great for the app store. What happens to discoverability when your content isn't on the mobile web (and with google penalizing you for not having a mobile friendly site)?

As a publisher I envision redirecting all iOS users to an app download page. Which means Android users would happily browse the page with free content while Apple users are forced to install an app. Not really the best sales argument for Apple? Especially if you consider that the app probably requires permission to get a lot more of your data than any webpage ever could... Nicely done Apple! :-)

Re: An Hour with Safari Content Blocker in iOS 9

#70

Post by tlack »

slang800 wrote: post #68
tlack wrote: post #64

Sadly, this won't be the end of intrusive advertising. It will just go underground. I think as a result of wide-spread ad blocking we'll see three worrying trends develop. 1. More paid-only content More content will go behind pay gates and login gates, like the NYT site, as sites scramble to monetize. This is bad for society as a whole as we lose free access to information. 2. Advertising goes server-side Advertising…

> In the future, ads will be indistinguishable from content, and [the] already shaky wall between editorial and advertising will collapse completely. If anything, that should give us even more reason to attack this new form of advertising. Ad-blockers were born out of a pretty mild inconvenience. But hidden ads are far more sinister, and thus - should result in far more people coming up with ways to remove them. > No…

> But hidden ads are far more sinister, and thus - should result in far more people coming up with ways to remove them.

But how? Give me an example on a site like my (admittedly far from perfect) startup, http://lump.co. How would you identify an ad which posed as a gallery, or posed as a photo in a gallery? There would be no way to identify it - at all.

On a blog, an entire post could be an advertisement for a product. They wouldn't bother labeling them - to avoid the ad block. The only person that loses is the consumer who can no longer trust what they read.

> At this point, hosting is basically free

I envy those kinds of sites!

My S3 bills were $1200 a month (switched to Incero). I am taking in 2,000 new gallery posts, each with 50 photos that I download, per day, filling 2tb of disk every month or so. Far from free for startups that are data or processing heavy! Even for a blog, WPengine, various SaaS offerings you need, and misc stuff can easily reach $100+, before you add Cloudflare..

And that's before we even consider the human time that goes into it.

Running a site ain't free.

> Flattr and Gittip

This is the best approach. I hope the world becomes comfortable paying tiny amounts for content. Sadly I feel like that's a ways away, especially for the non-US demo. And I hope those systems support refunds because often I'm disappointed by content once I get a chance to really read it. :)

p.s. I'm not trying to make this about me. I am just an example of a common case.

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