Crystal – iOS 9 ad blocker

But those pop-up blockers weren't always the default, and when people started installing addons to Firefox back in the day to block them I kept hearing all these same arguments about how it was immoral and going to kill the publishing industry.

It's not an issue of morality. It's an issue of overstepping what's acceptable to someone clicking on a link, exactly the same as what happened to pop-ups and pop-unders.

Look at the two dev tools charts here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9605/the-ios-9-review/10#Safar...

That is crazy. I'm sorry, but if your business model depends on megabytes of JS and 20 seconds per-page of network activity on my mobile device, I'm going to block it if I can. And if your business model fails, that's not my problem.

It's not even the advertisements that are the issue. If everyone started just serving images and removed all of the JS coming down from these ad exchanges I would turn my ad blocker off.

(As an aside, it's a hilarious juxtaposition listening to the arguments about the taxi industry and why Uber killing them is for the best, at the same time as I'm hearing the arguments about how a random publisher should be able to decide how much code I'm going to allow to execute on my own personal device and me blocking it is immoral or entitled.)

That's exactly why I said you don't understand what targeted advertisement can do. Let's talk about 3 concepts:

1) Relevance. Take your cooking website example, say if that recipes has chicken in it. Then the magazine method can show you an ad about local supermarket for you to buy chicken. Then how do they know if you "probably" prefer walmart or wholefoods or local farmer's market? What if you are an organic guy? (which means you probably prefer wholefoods) Traditional magazine method doesn't make the result relevant enough for today's online advertising standard.

2) Feedback. As a brand who wanna do an online campaign, how do I know if my advertisement works? Today's advertiser no longer count on clicks, they count on impression. They don't need you to click to ad. They just want to make sure you see it. How do they if you didn't block to ad? How do they know if you didn't go to other tabs when their 15 second youtube ad is playing? That means at least 1 additional request send out from your browser. Usually it's more because they wanna know if you watched half of the video or the whole video. Things above don't have to be done with tracking you profile, but the other things does. For example, how to the advertisers know if they reach their target audience? If I'm selling the new mustang how do I know if I show the ad to ford people instead of chevy people? It's called on target percentage and it's one of the top metrics advertisers care about.

3) Availability. In many situations, there's just no ad available that actually relevant to the content. Then it's better for advertisers to show you something that may relevant to you instead of something completely random or no ad at all.

Your magazine method has works for decades doesn't mean it will continue to work in the future. Does magazine itself still work?

BTW, when I raise the WSJ thing I didn't target you specifically and I have no idea you had that comment you posted before. But as you said, you (and probably most people) won't pay for subscription for such ridiculous publication. Then advertisement is the way for you to read it freely so you can identify if the article is ridiculous or not. Or maybe just don't read it and comment by title?

Okay if I understand correctly, you just hate targeting ads with tracking not any ads right? Then instead of using ad blocker, you can opt out from cookie tracking on NAI so all participating companies of NAI (which covers almost all major players in the ad network industry) will not use your cookie.

I should clarify: Among people that don't use credit cards like kids or the paranoid, the typical solution is to use a gift card. I, personally, do not like to use credit cards for purchases less than 40$. I certainly didn't think my comment was worthy of downvoting, especially since the comment I replied to asked if it was required.

I work for one of the ad network. And I know the people in my company who implemented that specific piece of code for that specific opt-out feature. It's one of the most safety-critical feature we have so we do regression test before every single release regardless if we modified that code or not. So I'm pretty sure that opt-out feature works. Because if it doesn't, someone gonna sue us.

I find it really hard to communicate with you because before we even start this discussion you seems already tagged the entire ad industry as an "evil empire" who try to steal your personal information all the time. The ad industry is not an angle for sure. It's just a business that try to make money, like any other business. Intentionally ruin people's life is not the interest of any mature business. Believe or not, doing things that make people hate ads is the last thing the ad industry wants. Because the more everyone hate ads, the less effective those ad campaigns will be, and the less ad companies get paid. Most of the problems with ads today are not introduced in favor of anybody, it's just not as easy as you might think to find a overall better way. Do you recall how many years it has been for people to actually produce a practical substitution for gas engine since everyone realize it's messing up our planet?

In the end, I'm interest to hear your vision on how to fund high quality online contents today without the profit of targeted advertisement.