There are other content blockers available. If what you are suggesting is true that Google paid him to take it down then they just started a new cottage industry - write a content blocker and have Google pay you to take it down. If Crystal follows the same path then there might be something to your conspiracy theory.
There is no realistic chance that he was paid to take this down. That wouldn't make any sense at all economically, and doesn't fit with Marco's style at all. He had second thoughts, that's all.
Ads are NOT the problem except for the self playing ads.
No the problem is the tracking apps that are present on the majority of sites including this one.
At one stage I saw Ghostery block 23 trackers on Macworld. What is the legitimacy of 23 trackers on one site. Pick one and go with that. I'm currently blocking 10 on this site as we speak.
Then there's the fact that most of the ads are Flash based. For pete's sake why are advertisers so retarded that they think they must do all of that work with Flash? There is legitimately no reason they can't use HTML5 to do the same thing which means no plugin which means faster loading times.
Why when I have "Do not track" set in Safari do these advertises actively try to find ways to circumvent this? They are in essence breaking the law in many countries.
So no. I have no problems using AdBlockers if it means not being subjected to illegal operations in the first place.
Rule of engagement is shoot first and ask question later. So I am enabling the ad blocker on my iOS device. If a site has good contents and sensible ads, I will whitelist them then. We consumers will be responsible while we expect the publishers to be responsible and make their living. Thank you Apple for empowering us. This is the new covenant.
Then there's the fact that most of the ads are Flash based. For pete's sake why are advertisers so retarded that they think they must do all of that work with Flash? There is legitimately no reason they can't use HTML5 to do the same thing which means no plugin which means faster loading times.
Uninstall or disable Flash, or simply use the Click2Flash extension.
Why when I have "Do not track" set in Safari do these advertises actively try to find ways to circumvent this?
They don't have to circumvent anything or in any way be clever, they simply have to ignore it. It's more work for them to look for and then abide by DNT requests by a browser.
The only reason I said theoretical is that I have not proven for myself that an AJAX get can actually walk the DOM of the parent page to the degree necessary to get access to your username in this forum. I plan to test this now that I imagined the potential exploit. I am sort of a JS hacker so things like this occur to me from time to time.
I don't run an ad-blocker and never have. I think asking me to consider this product or that is a small price to pay for free reading material. There's nothing wrong with people simply asking you to consider their product after all.
However, that's not all the advertisers ask of you these days. They also track you, and that poisons the well for me. It changes my opinion of online ads from something that, while annoying at times, is essentially benign, to something more sinister. Tracking is something the police should do to crooks, it's not something ordinary people should have done to them.
And that I think is what has prompted Apple's response. New technology enables new things (as it always has) and the advertisers have gone too far. I have not installed iOS 9 yet, but if the News app lets me read AI, while viewing ads, but tightly controlled ads with no tracking, I would be a happy man.
p.s. kudos to the author for being open about his position and discussing it, instead of just not mentioning it, which was another option he had.
I run a series of websites that makes multi-thousand dollars per day in advertising, but the click through rate is less than 1% for just about everything except in-house ads.
It's extremely easy to defeat ad blocking, as much as the developers might suggest otherwise. "Adblock plus" is considered the most "malicious-intent" ad blocking extension in desktop browsers primarily because it indiscriminately blocks domains, urls, filenames, css id's, and so forth. So if you want to force users with ADP installed to turn it off, you simply enclose the entire content with a known css id that is blocked and leave an underlying content unit that doesn't disappear mentioning this. There's also far more complex ways that involve script of forcing ads on all users, but it largely is dependant on only using in-house ads, which is impractical, since the highest paying ads have the absolutely worst script mechanics (most ads are a an infinite chain of document.write 's or iframes until something is shown.)
The tracking mechanism however require clarification.
Advertisers use one tracker to ensure they don't show you ads you don't want to see, and another to keep showing you the same ad (Amazon, JCP, BH Photo, and Alibaba do this off the top of my head) known as "retargeting" from something you saw on a site you visited not to long ago. If you turn cookies off on the advertisers website what will happen is you will see no ads, stock ads (eg non-paying), or it will fall through to another ad network.
The rest of the trackers are "audience tracking" which the advertisers don't even need, and are largely used to check for click-fraud and tuning ads for certain audiences.
Ghostery is a better "ads and tracker management" plugin than ADP is for this reason, because you can selectively whitelist sites or turn off just the worst-behaving advertisers, leaving everything else alone. The "Peace" plugin mentioned in the original post used Ghostery's database without the whitelisting features, so it was effectively acting worse than Ghostery itself would.
The best kind of ads, I think, from a reader's perspective, were the early versions of Google's text-only Adsense ads in the mid-2000s - informative, non-intrusive and didn't take up much computing resources.
And when was the last time you saw one of those? The truth is nobody clicks on those, and since they're CPC ads, nobody wants them either. Adsense is CPC and the payout is pretty much garbage. On a site that might make 10,000$ a month from just a 20% CPM payout with another ad network that uses just images, Adsense might earn the site 50$.
It's not clicks... it's about impressions.. that is to say, how many times the ad is made visible... clicking on an ad is worth an order of magnitude more money.
You're both wrong. Adsense is CPC (Cost per Click), and has "potentially" a higher payout... CPC ads are the reason there is so much "auto-popup" clickfraud out there. Advertisers like CPC because they only pay when there is a click, Publishers hate CPC ads because it's not worth putting a CPC ad up if the payout is 2 cents after being shown a million times, versus a CPM ad that might pay 1000$ for the same traffic. CPM is paid by impressions, regardless of it being clicked on. Advertisers don't like CPM as much because some websites "auto-reload" their ads to burn through the inventory on purpose. CPM ads do extremely poorly on user-generated-content sites like forums because the ads tend not to be located before or after the content. click on the "post number" on any post in this forum and you'll see why.
CPM ads don't pay if clicked on, CPC ads only pay if clicked on. The former makes a website more money and is less intrusive. CPM requires a tracking mechanism so if the contract is "2 impressions per visitor per day" you're not seeing the same ad over and over again. CPC will show the same ad infinitely, even if you click on it, if it's the only ad in the chain.
Publishers tend to have something like this:
In house contracted ads (CPM) -> High Paying and non-obnoxious CPM ads -> Low Paying third party ads (DoubleClick) CPM/CPC-> Adsense(CPC)-> In house ads (self-promotion)
The most troublesome ads come from low paying "maximize fill" option, because this means the ad network will attempt to put ANYTHING in the ad slot. The "update your flash" and "your computer is infected, call microsoft" garbage ads come from allowing "maximize fill" because you end up getting all the ads that other publishers have already blocked that land on that third party network.
None of the ad blockers even function on 32-bit CPU iPads, like my iPad3. They only work on stupid, new 64-bit iOS devices. That may make you cutting edge folks happy, but the rest of us get nothing good with the new iOS. Seriously, about the only noticeable changes I see on my iPad 3 are a lowercase keyboard, a new face on the app switcher, and a new face on Siri. Yeah, I've read about the new font, but honestly my eyes don't perceive a difference. Performance is exactly the same as iOS 8, and time will tell if battery life is longer.
The media should therefore be ashamed if themselves for willfully neglecting to mention Adblock incompatibility with older iOS hardware, and neglecting to cite how many millions of those devices were sold and, like my iPad3, are still in active use. That is what good reporting is all about. Present ALL the facts, not just some. Consider also that even though new OS adoption is swift among iOS users, a majority of iOS users still haven't updated to iOS9 yet, and some devices like my daughter's 4th gen iPod Touch can never update past iOS 6. A lot of older Apple devices are in service, and their already slow processors will continue to be bogged down with ads. So give us a break with the lies that "no one will ever see our precious ads that fund us!" There are plenty of us who see those stupid ads and hate them. That won't be changing anytime soon.
Nonintrusive ads are expected and I have no problem with them, but ads that pop up and block what I was reading make it less likely I will purchase the advertised product. Sort of like Pavlov's dog.
Depends on the circumstance. I don't think ads for weightloss or erectile dysfunction belong on a niche Apple fan site but ads for discounts on Apple gear are perfectly fine.
My experience with my iPadAir is so much better after installing Crystal ad blocker. Its the way the internet suppose to be!
Thank you for sharing. I gave your post a Thumbs-up. By the way, I learned about the 64-bit CPU requirement in the reviews of the App Store yesterday when I pondered downloading an Adblocker for my iPad3 just after my iOS9 update. I was hoping to use PURIFY, which is recommended by the PEACE app developer who pulled his own app. Some users of the Crystal blocker have reviewed PURIFY to say they like it better, despite the higher cost. Of course, I cannot give my opinion of any blocker since my poor iPad3 has been descrimated against and cannot run them at all.
I just installed AdBlock and I can use my iPad again for web surfing, it is miraculous how silky smooth web sites are again. Thank you Apple. Yes I would pay to subscribe to AI.
This is a free app, I have no idea how much better paid ones are.
Appleinsider is my go to website. I have no problem with ad blockers and no problem with a reasonable subscription fee. After 15 minutes on your mobile web site looking for how to subscribe I gave up. Make subscription very obvious with the pricing well defined. I would subscribe if I could figure out how. Who does your web site? Don't you want subscribers?
Comments
There are other content blockers available. If what you are suggesting is true that Google paid him to take it down then they just started a new cottage industry - write a content blocker and have Google pay you to take it down. If Crystal follows the same path then there might be something to your conspiracy theory.
There is no realistic chance that he was paid to take this down. That wouldn't make any sense at all economically, and doesn't fit with Marco's style at all. He had second thoughts, that's all.
No the problem is the tracking apps that are present on the majority of sites including this one.
At one stage I saw Ghostery block 23 trackers on Macworld. What is the legitimacy of 23 trackers on one site. Pick one and go with that. I'm currently blocking 10 on this site as we speak.
Then there's the fact that most of the ads are Flash based. For pete's sake why are advertisers so retarded that they think they must do all of that work with Flash? There is legitimately no reason they can't use HTML5 to do the same thing which means no plugin which means faster loading times.
Why when I have "Do not track" set in Safari do these advertises actively try to find ways to circumvent this? They are in essence breaking the law in many countries.
So no. I have no problems using AdBlockers if it means not being subjected to illegal operations in the first place.
Uninstall or disable Flash, or simply use the Click2Flash extension.
They don't have to circumvent anything or in any way be clever, they simply have to ignore it. It's more work for them to look for and then abide by DNT requests by a browser.
The only reason I said theoretical is that I have not proven for myself that an AJAX get can actually walk the DOM of the parent page to the degree necessary to get access to your username in this forum. I plan to test this now that I imagined the potential exploit. I am sort of a JS hacker so things like this occur to me from time to time.
Not hard to see this site is overkill.
Hah, 16 blocked? That's nothing. A few weeks ago, I was getting numbers blocked in the mid-60s on AI! (I posted about it then.)
Anyone else experience that? I thought that it was beyond egregious.
That’s fine, but why?
I run a series of websites that makes multi-thousand dollars per day in advertising, but the click through rate is less than 1% for just about everything except in-house ads.
It's extremely easy to defeat ad blocking, as much as the developers might suggest otherwise. "Adblock plus" is considered the most "malicious-intent" ad blocking extension in desktop browsers primarily because it indiscriminately blocks domains, urls, filenames, css id's, and so forth. So if you want to force users with ADP installed to turn it off, you simply enclose the entire content with a known css id that is blocked and leave an underlying content unit that doesn't disappear mentioning this. There's also far more complex ways that involve script of forcing ads on all users, but it largely is dependant on only using in-house ads, which is impractical, since the highest paying ads have the absolutely worst script mechanics (most ads are a an infinite chain of document.write 's or iframes until something is shown.)
The tracking mechanism however require clarification.
Advertisers use one tracker to ensure they don't show you ads you don't want to see, and another to keep showing you the same ad (Amazon, JCP, BH Photo, and Alibaba do this off the top of my head) known as "retargeting" from something you saw on a site you visited not to long ago. If you turn cookies off on the advertisers website what will happen is you will see no ads, stock ads (eg non-paying), or it will fall through to another ad network.
The rest of the trackers are "audience tracking" which the advertisers don't even need, and are largely used to check for click-fraud and tuning ads for certain audiences.
Ghostery is a better "ads and tracker management" plugin than ADP is for this reason, because you can selectively whitelist sites or turn off just the worst-behaving advertisers, leaving everything else alone. The "Peace" plugin mentioned in the original post used Ghostery's database without the whitelisting features, so it was effectively acting worse than Ghostery itself would.
And when was the last time you saw one of those? The truth is nobody clicks on those, and since they're CPC ads, nobody wants them either. Adsense is CPC and the payout is pretty much garbage. On a site that might make 10,000$ a month from just a 20% CPM payout with another ad network that uses just images, Adsense might earn the site 50$.
You're both wrong. Adsense is CPC (Cost per Click), and has "potentially" a higher payout... CPC ads are the reason there is so much "auto-popup" clickfraud out there. Advertisers like CPC because they only pay when there is a click, Publishers hate CPC ads because it's not worth putting a CPC ad up if the payout is 2 cents after being shown a million times, versus a CPM ad that might pay 1000$ for the same traffic. CPM is paid by impressions, regardless of it being clicked on. Advertisers don't like CPM as much because some websites "auto-reload" their ads to burn through the inventory on purpose. CPM ads do extremely poorly on user-generated-content sites like forums because the ads tend not to be located before or after the content. click on the "post number" on any post in this forum and you'll see why.
CPM ads don't pay if clicked on, CPC ads only pay if clicked on. The former makes a website more money and is less intrusive. CPM requires a tracking mechanism so if the contract is "2 impressions per visitor per day" you're not seeing the same ad over and over again. CPC will show the same ad infinitely, even if you click on it, if it's the only ad in the chain.
Publishers tend to have something like this:
In house contracted ads (CPM) -> High Paying and non-obnoxious CPM ads -> Low Paying third party ads (DoubleClick) CPM/CPC-> Adsense(CPC)-> In house ads (self-promotion)
The most troublesome ads come from low paying "maximize fill" option, because this means the ad network will attempt to put ANYTHING in the ad slot. The "update your flash" and "your computer is infected, call microsoft" garbage ads come from allowing "maximize fill" because you end up getting all the ads that other publishers have already blocked that land on that third party network.
The media should therefore be ashamed if themselves for willfully neglecting to mention Adblock incompatibility with older iOS hardware, and neglecting to cite how many millions of those devices were sold and, like my iPad3, are still in active use. That is what good reporting is all about. Present ALL the facts, not just some. Consider also that even though new OS adoption is swift among iOS users, a majority of iOS users still haven't updated to iOS9 yet, and some devices like my daughter's 4th gen iPod Touch can never update past iOS 6. A lot of older Apple devices are in service, and their already slow processors will continue to be bogged down with ads. So give us a break with the lies that "no one will ever see our precious ads that fund us!" There are plenty of us who see those stupid ads and hate them. That won't be changing anytime soon.
Depends on the circumstance. I don't think ads for weightloss or erectile dysfunction belong on a niche Apple fan site but ads for discounts on Apple gear are perfectly fine.
Just doesn't feel good.
Thanks for the link, I thought he was very articulate.
His two suggestions - Purify and Crystal - do seem to have flexible options to avoid blanket elimination
of ads on sites you choose to support...I wonder whether you could or should use both in iOS9?
I use both Ghostery and AdBlockPlus in OS X, and they seem to attack different 'invaders', somewhat.
...This opinion has been brought to you by your friends at...
Thank you for sharing. I gave your post a Thumbs-up. By the way, I learned about the 64-bit CPU requirement in the reviews of the App Store yesterday when I pondered downloading an Adblocker for my iPad3 just after my iOS9 update. I was hoping to use PURIFY, which is recommended by the PEACE app developer who pulled his own app. Some users of the Crystal blocker have reviewed PURIFY to say they like it better, despite the higher cost. Of course, I cannot give my opinion of any blocker since my poor iPad3 has been descrimated against and cannot run them at all.
Best wishes.
This is a free app, I have no idea how much better paid ones are.
I wonder what the impact on Google will be? They have to be sweating!
It is simply called Adblock and it is in the App Store. The o is a no entry sign.
The problem is that clown charged $2 for his App and then stop supporting it after 2 days.
If it was a free App I would have ZERO problem with what he done. Even worse he is not refunding people directly but is passing the buck to Apple.
Apple take the payment (and take their 30%) and keep the customer information. How is Marco supposed to refund the customers directly?
The app didn't stop working. Customers can carry on using it, and it's apparently very good.
Guy is a flat out idiot. If he had reservations he should have made it a free App.
If you have reservations you shoudl work for free? When has that ever been a thing?
I didn't buy the App but got Crystal for free. I delete the clowns podcast App.
Cut off your nose to spite no one in particular.