Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The adblocking revolution is months away

theoverspill.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 355 posts

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#321

Post by charlesarthur »

hiou wrote: post #203
usaphp wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Cripple the iOS web browser just enough that web apps trying to have native style performance will struggle." Are you saying that web apps run on android browser smoother than on iOs Safari? I don't think so... > "Ban Flash. Biggest competition for apps". I think Flash was banned because it's crap in terms of security and battery drainer, not much because its a competition to apps. You seem to be pretty bias in yo…

The statement of discussion was > 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. My points were evidence to the contrary of that statement. I was not discussing the motivations of Google in regards to their users. My point is that Apple's business mod…

"Flash(and upcoming AIR) was at the time a true contender for becoming the cross platform desktop/native type application interface. Once Apple banned Flash, companies moved away from the platform and it withered."

Simply not true. Flash continued to be made available for Android, and Adobe boasted of the number of installs it would have (200m by the end of 2011, it claimed [1]). Apple had, and has, a small share of the mobile and desktop market. But nobody could get Flash to work well on mobile. That is why it died.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2011/feb/14/mobil... (disclosure: by me. I was there.)

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#322

Post by kinghajj »

hsod wrote: post #319
kinghajj wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So long as their HTTP server responds to requests received from me, then it is "right" for me to perform whichever operations I choose with their response. Once data is on my machine, I get to decide how to process it, not them. If they don't want me to have their data, it is well within their rights not to provide it to me.

Why must the restriction be technical? This is the whole concept of an honor system. Why can't you use someone else's server under their (reasonable and clearly communicated) terms? I could leave a bowl of candy on my desk with a sign that says "take one"-- there's nothing physically stopping you from taking the whole bowl, but that doesn't make it OK.

> Why can't you use someone else's server under their (reasonable and clearly communicated) terms?

Well, for one, clearly communicated to who, and when? Before I ever receive the first request, I cannot a priori know of any terms. Even afterwards, you're assuming that a person has read and comprehended the information, which is often not true. I suppose you'd say that's alright, but that when or if the terms are even comprehended, from that point forward they should be obeyed. I would still disagree, however. The crucial difference from your bowl of candy is that sending an HTTP request is a kind of speech act. Having those kind of terms on a web site fundamentally violates my right to apply whichever voltages across wires I own. A better analogy would be a company that sets up an automated mail-receiving machine that automatically sends a piece of candy--along with a printed ad, let's say--back to the originator. It wouldn't be right for such a company to demand that I open their reply in a certain way--for example, by requiring that I look at the ad that came along with the candy--because at that point, the candy and ad are mine, and if I wish to construct a candy-extracting machine that prevents me from seeing the ads, then that's my right.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#323

Post by keithpeter »

unprepare wrote: post #316
keithpeter wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, I rather like a clever advertising hoarding (aka billboard). Some of the little ads you get on buses can be quite funny. These things occupy a tiny percentage of my field of view for a few seconds. They may leave a trace of positivity about the thing being advertised in a general sort of way. The thing about intrusive adverts in Web pages is the visual noise and the tracking of behaviour across sites. The l…

Great post, i think you just missed one increasingly important aspect: You dont have a monthly cap on how much of your surroundings you can take in; many people have caps placed on how much data they can download. There is an actual measurable cost to advertisements over a metered data plan. It literally costs you money to even see an ad. If it was 50 cents per MB, are you still going to enjoy that delightful little…

I take your point - I have no hard and fast cap on this adsl broadband over copper connection. Reminds me in a way of the annoyance with faxed adverts we used to have decades ago - that might be a useful analogy if you are dealing with PHBs.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#324

Post by charlesarthur »

prapam2 wrote: post #224
threeseed wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How long will this revolution last if content providers decide to not show content to iOS users? Good luck with that. iOS users make up a significant percentage of web traffic and are demographically the most valuable (generally of a higher socio-economic status). By alienating them they won't be coming to your site which means no opportunity to upsell them to a paid version of the content. Advertisers don't deserv…

"higher socio-economic status" - might be outside US but aren't the mobile subsidized in US. There was discussion in reddit about an article about Moto on how its going to change the way mobiles are purchased. One of the top commented reply was about people not willing to buy $400+ mobiles.

"There was discussion in reddit about an article about Moto on how its going to change the way mobiles are purchased. One of the top commented reply was about people not willing to buy $400+ mobiles."

Motorola is not going to change the way the vast majority of mobiles are purchased in the US, which is through carriers. No matter how many comments an article might have had on Reddit. Emerging markets (specifically: India) might have lots of people buying phones online, but the US has a long-established system which is extremely resistant to disruption. According to ComScore [1] in May 2015 Apple+Samsung had over 72% of the installed base of smartphones in the US. No reason for that to change in any hurry.

Observation: don't use the number of comments on articles on Reddit as a metric of anything except the number of comments on articles on Reddit.

[1] http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Market-Rankings/comScore-Re...

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#325

Post by charlesarthur »

qq66 wrote: post #259
charlesarthur wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Apple pushing ahead with this will just make Google desperately push Android as hard as they can." What does that mean, exactly? "they might be more willing to see Android devices put into consumers' hands at break-even (or even loss-making) prices" That already happens. Samsung's profits and phone shipments are substantially down, LG made 1.5cents operating profit per phone in Q2, Sony made a loss, HTC made a loss;…

> This is a common refrain since about 2010. Hasn't happened so far. iOS market share has declined tremendously since 2010, from approximately 80% to approximately 20%.

"iOS market share has declined tremendously since 2010, from approximately 80% to approximately 20%."

Not so. IDC data: iPhones shipped in 2010: 47.45m. Total smartphones shipped worldwide in 2010: 303.9m. iPhone share: 15.6%.

iPhones shipped in 2014: 192.6m. Total smartphones: 1.295bn. iPhone share: 14.8%.

As a percentage of all mobile phones (including featurephones), iPhone shipments have risen steadily from about 3.3% (average across 2010) to 11.8% (average first two quarters of 2015).

I don't know where you got your numbers from, but they don't match any I recognise. (Equally, if you're using "market share" to mean "install base" - don't. They're not congruent.)

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#326

Post by jff »

mokus wrote: post #317
jff wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People need to stop using "net neutrality" whenever the idea of paying for something on the Internet comes up.

Paying _ISPs_ for content is exactly what net neutrality is about. I already pay my ISP to deliver bits. I'm not giving them a microcent more for the privilege of having all content that isn't in some "package" blocked or throttled.

The GP didn't say anything about blocking or throttling, merely that you'd pay to have access to content you wouldn't get otherwise and that ISPs could offer subscription bundles to their customers--pay $5/month and get unlimited access to the NYT and a bunch of other paywalled news sites.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#327

Post by mokus »

jff wrote: post #326
mokus wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying _ISPs_ for content is exactly what net neutrality is about. I already pay my ISP to deliver bits. I'm not giving them a microcent more for the privilege of having all content that isn't in some "package" blocked or throttled.

The GP didn't say anything about blocking or throttling, merely that you'd pay to have access to content you wouldn't get otherwise and that ISPs could offer subscription bundles to their customers--pay $5/month and get unlimited access to the NYT and a bunch of other paywalled news sites.

Ah, I see. In that case, yes - there's no connection to net neutrality as long as they don't penalize anyone in any way for buying those subscriptions directly from the sites themselves (EDIT: or other sources... if i buy a sub on my ISP it should still be valid when I visit my parents who have a different ISP, etc).

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#328

Post by interpol_p »

s73v3r wrote: post #267
interpol_p wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think "free with ads" is being done backwards most of the time. It's all about analysing the user to algorithmically determine the best pre-designed ad to serve them. It's tacky and people are extremely good at ignoring it, even without ad blockers. "Free with ads" should be that my favourite authors get paid to use a product or service and then write about it if they like it. I don't want to see ads for things tha…

How in the hell would that work for some dinky little mobile game?

Yeah I don't think ad-supported is good for mobile games. What are we doing at the moment? Forcing players to watch videos to earn coins, sticking ads in user's faces. No one wants this. It just dilutes the value of advertisements and annoys users.

Just because it generates money doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#329

Post by interpol_p »

Kalium wrote: post #268
interpol_p wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ban flash. Biggest competition to native apps That's not why that happened. Flash wasn't "banned," Apple chose not to allow support for it in Mobile Safari from the beginning. It was never removed or banned. Flash was a dog. Power hungry, slow, inefficient. I recently had to touch the codebase for an Adobe Air iOS app and the runtime is pretty horrific. Adobe never got flash good enough for mobile, and Apple was ri…

Apple wanted turn-by-turn, and Google wanted branding and some influence over the app in exchange. Apple wanted turn-by-turn, but apparently wasn't willing to give up much of anything to get it. So Apple jettisoned Google to do it themselves. Then Apple discovered that mapping isn't nearly as easy as Google made it look when their users were unhappy with a decidedly inferior product.

Right, Apple and Google really didn't have much of a choice.

There is no way Apple was going to brand iOS, which is understandable — that would be like seeing an "Intel Inside" sticker on a MacBook.

And there was no way Google would just "hand over" a differentiating feature of Android to their biggest competitor.

Re: The adblocking revolution is months away

#330

Post by interpol_p »

Joeri wrote: post #246
interpol_p wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ban flash. Biggest competition to native apps That's not why that happened. Flash wasn't "banned," Apple chose not to allow support for it in Mobile Safari from the beginning. It was never removed or banned. Flash was a dog. Power hungry, slow, inefficient. I recently had to touch the codebase for an Adobe Air iOS app and the runtime is pretty horrific. Adobe never got flash good enough for mobile, and Apple was ri…

Flash was not slow, it's just that flash ads were ahead of their time in abusing the system's resources. The supposed slowness of flash relative to browser api's was a myth, although flash content was bloated, in much the same way that modern web pages are bloated. When flash was killed by Jobs I knew it was just a matter of time until people did the same bad things with JavaScript and CSS as they did with flash, and…

Flash was slow on mobile. Adobe Air is still slow on iOS compared to UIKit or OpenGL.
Post reply on HN