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The adblocking revolution is months away

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Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#51
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple gets a cut on any money made from apps but not from Web ads. Not if those apps are free and using non-Apple advertising networks like AdMob.

Then they still get the $100 the dev paid to publish the app in the first place.

$100 minus the reviewer salary, bandwidth, support, etc etc

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#52
post #3

The amount of companies that are providing some form of tracking or advanced analytics based on traditional mobile advertising is pretty huge. This could eventually be an event significant enough to kill a number of companies.

And I for one would say: good riddance.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#53
post #9

As expected this is going to have a negative affect on ad revenues but what people forget is that publishers won't just accept lower revenues. They're going innovate. The easiest thing to implement would be a paywall but after the paywall we are going to see a rise in microtransactions for content. That being said there are advantages to the subscription model. Maybe, publishers will stop posting click-baity headline…

The web is 20 years old. I think if this was going to happen, it would have happened by now.

Outside of a few niches, people just aren't willing to pay to read websites.

What I could see happening is premium content being bundled by ISPs. Pay for X package from Y ISP, get content from A, B and C websites. Kind-of like how TV channels are bundled.

In all likelihood though, I think advertising will continue as is. Advertisers will just come up with cleverer ways of presenting it.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#54
post #5

The overall article is of good quality but it reeks of Apple bias I personally find distasteful. >>> User experience is what Apple puts above pretty much everything else, and they’ve decided that they don’t like it the experience available through the ad-supported web, and so they’re going to do something about it. The reason Apple does this is to push content creators away from the Web and into native apps. Apple ge…

> I'll bet Apple won't consider "Install from Apple Store" type messages as ads.

Apple won't consider anything as ads. What they provided was the hooks for developers to implement "Content Blocking Safari Extensions" [1]. To quote the docs:

"Your app extension is responsible for supplying a JSON file to Safari. The JSON consists of an array of rules (triggers and actions) for blocking specified content. Safari converts the JSON to bytecode, which it applies efficiently to all resource loads without leaking information about the user’s browsing back to the app extension."

There will be competing AdBlocking extensions just like on Firefox, for instance. It will be up to the developers to create the rules of what should be blocked and what should be allowed.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/releaseno...

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#55
post #25

>>Of course, at this point we should step back and ask “why were the adverts there in the first place?” Oh yes, because they help pay for the content. In some – well, many, almost all – cases, they pay for all of the content. Honestly? I don't give a crap. Too many places have abused it and thrown stupid crap in just so they can make money. Just like the idiots who are careless with fireworks and then states ban them…

Like the New York Times....pretty sure they're not all "bullshit media rewriters" there.

Expect a LOT more "Become a member" or "Subscribe to..." websites as adblockers become more popular.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#56
post #5

The overall article is of good quality but it reeks of Apple bias I personally find distasteful. >>> User experience is what Apple puts above pretty much everything else, and they’ve decided that they don’t like it the experience available through the ad-supported web, and so they’re going to do something about it. The reason Apple does this is to push content creators away from the Web and into native apps. Apple ge…

It can be both. If people find the ad supported web unpleasant, doing the right thing for the user experience is also something that benefits their bottom line.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#57

How long will this revolution last if content providers decide to not show content to iOS users? I mean if they exist to make money and they can't on iOS would it matter that there were hundreds of millions of them? With ad blocking it would be as if they never existed in first place. Perhaps the idea is for Apple to get the content providers to make apps so they get their cut? Perhaps it is better for the content pr…

> How long will this revolution last if content providers decide to not show content to iOS users?

Which begs the question:

How long will content providers last if they decide to not show content to iOS users?

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#58
post #29
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is adblocking on Android.

Ad blocking is very expensive. The iOS approach is the best idea. Have you seen the cost in memory and CPU of browser ad blocker extensions? That's prohibitive in mobile.

Adaway just modifies your /etc/hosts file to redirect ad domains to localhost. That definitely doesn't seem expensive...

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#60
And the Ad-network rearchetechture is probably already built. The way all of these adblockers are typically implemented is an IP/DNS Name black list where the requests to those locations are stopped short. There is a super simple solution though, those who want to leverage ads for revenue can just bundle the advertising material into the content of the page rather than including the ads via third party ajax calls. Sure perhaps you could then play another iteration of cat and mouse by trying to tease out ads from NLP or with some sort of visual hashing, but at the end of the day, that is a much more difficult technical challenge than blocking ajax calls or bundling content.
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