Publishers and sites deserve this. Consumers have been force fed terribly slow and intrusive ads for years. And if content publishers need ad revenue to survive then get a damn business degree and find another model to fund your business. It's called adaption and evolution, those that can't do either will die off, including perhaps Apple Insider
Everybody suggests finding an alternative revenue stream but never offer any feasible suggestions. Advertising is a way of earning money without asking the content consumer for any money and it scales with content popularity, what else offers that? People will only pay money in return for something.
People say they'd pay subscriptions but it would be a fraction of the number who use an ad-supported model. There are forum members here who are millionaires, even billionaires and even they likely wouldn't pay for it because it's like any value system. You weigh up how much you'd be willing to pay for what you get in return. A forum about Apple is a relatively special interest site. Loads of people have Apple products but they don't want to talk about Apple because Apple's a business. You're also not paying to express your opinion, you can do that for free, you do it to hear other opinions. But people don't like to hear opinions they disagree with so they won't pay for that and if the interest group is narrowed, it further shrinks the revenue potential. A dozen people paying $5 per year to hear their own opinions reaffirmed isn't a business model.
It also has to be a subscription. You have to think about what is being paid for. The revenue for blogs is to pay for someone to work constantly. You can't pay once off and have them work forever, they need to earn money every single year. If there's a team of 6 staff and they each have to earn a minimum of $20k per year, that's $120k of revenue every single year on top of operational costs. If you had people paying $5 per year, you'd need 24,000 subscribers to pay their salaries. If you look at the active member counts, this site has hundreds of people in total but only a couple of dozen who are not just guest members, it'll be more in total but that gives a rough guide:
If the members were only full active members, it would be about 3 orders of magnitude short on revenue. This is why sites have become so laden with advertising because even a single ad stream isn't enough. It's also why you see special interest sites being closed down because the interest for the content isn't high enough to cover costs. This has happened with all the Mac magazines.
This is the same issue that has been facing the music industry with streaming. Advertising isn't paying enough when it's just put in as an addon because you can see how much it costs to buy advertising, that's the only money going into the system. John Gruber's site which was mentioned in the thread has a more exclusive revenue model:
He makes advertising exclusive to select advertisers and this is a direct form of advertising to 150k readers. If you have the reader volume then you can get away with less advertising and advertisers clearly value having a prominent placement. If your ad just sits in amongst a dozen others then it lowers the possibility someone will notice it. That site is also only funding one person.
If Gruber was an editor at AI and brought his subscriber base with him then this site could probably get rid of all but his own advertising model but he likely wouldn't do that because he's making it all for himself just now and would have little to gain.
This problem has all arisen from a trend that I mentioned in another thread about gaming, which is that over time, consumers have been conditioned to devalue soft-content. Consumers don't want to pay high prices for software like Adobe, they don't want to be paying $60 for games, they don't want to pay for music where $0.99 per track is too much and they don't want to pay at all for news. This coincides with a poor economy where people don't have much disposable income. The value of every product from a car to a home to a computer is based on a perception of worth with the minimum being based on the human cost that goes into making the product. With soft-content, the human cost is extremely variable. A team of 20 highly efficient producers can make a soft product that rivals 1000 inefficient ones. When it's a blog article from one person, it's given almost no value because you typing a reply can seem like just as much work and this is especially true if you disagree with the article. You essentially gained nothing from it and people don't like to pay for things that don't give them a return on their investment.
Also, it's funny to notice how page loading hasn't really gotten faster in the past ten years even with greater bandwidth. By now I'd have thought that clicking any website would open it instantaneously. Ads and trackers make that impossible.
Everybody suggests finding an alternative revenue stream but never offer any feasible suggestions. Advertising is a way of earning money without asking the content consumer for any money and it scales with content popularity, what else offers that? People will only pay money in return for something.
People say they'd pay subscriptions but it would be a fraction of the number who use an ad-supported model. There are forum members here who are millionaires, even billionaires and even they likely wouldn't pay for it because it's like any value system. You weigh up how much you'd be willing to pay for what you get in return. A forum about Apple is a relatively special interest site. Loads of people have Apple products but they don't want to talk about Apple because Apple's a business. You're also not paying to express your opinion, you can do that for free, you do it to hear other opinions. But people don't like to hear opinions they disagree with so they won't pay for that and if the interest group is narrowed, it further shrinks the revenue potential. A dozen people paying $5 per year to hear their own opinions reaffirmed isn't a business model.
It also has to be a subscription. You have to think about what is being paid for. The revenue for blogs is to pay for someone to work constantly. You can't pay once off and have them work forever, they need to earn money every single year. If there's a team of 6 staff and they each have to earn a minimum of $20k per year, that's $120k of revenue every single year on top of operational costs. If you had people paying $5 per year, you'd need 24,000 subscribers to pay their salaries. If you look at the active member counts, this site has hundreds of people in total but only a couple of dozen who are not just guest members, it'll be more in total but that gives a rough guide:
If the members were only full active members, it would be about 3 orders of magnitude short on revenue. This is why sites have become so laden with advertising because even a single ad stream isn't enough. It's also why you see special interest sites being closed down because the interest for the content isn't high enough to cover costs. This has happened with all the Mac magazines.
This is the same issue that has been facing the music industry with streaming. Advertising isn't paying enough when it's just put in as an addon because you can see how much it costs to buy advertising, that's the only money going into the system. John Gruber's site which was mentioned in the thread has a more exclusive revenue model:
He makes advertising exclusive to select advertisers and this is a direct form of advertising to 150k readers. If you have the reader volume then you can get away with less advertising and advertisers clearly value having a prominent placement. If your ad just sits in amongst a dozen others then it lowers the possibility someone will notice it. That site is also only funding one person.
If Gruber was an editor at AI and brought his subscriber base with him then this site could probably get rid of all but his own advertising model but he likely wouldn't do that because he's making it all for himself just now and would have little to gain.
This problem has all arisen from a trend that I mentioned in another thread about gaming, which is that over time, consumers have been conditioned to devalue soft-content. Consumers don't want to pay high prices for software like Adobe, they don't want to be paying $60 for games, they don't want to pay for music where $0.99 per track is too much and they don't want to pay at all for news. This coincides with a poor economy where people don't have much disposable income. The value of every product from a car to a home to a computer is based on a perception of worth with the minimum being based on the human cost that goes into making the product. With soft-content, the human cost is extremely variable. A team of 20 highly efficient producers can make a soft product that rivals 1000 inefficient ones. When it's a blog article from one person, it's given almost no value because you typing a reply can seem like just as much work and this is especially true if you disagree with the article. You essentially gained nothing from it and people don't like to pay for things that don't give them a return on their investment.
This website is the absolute worst, by far, that I visit regularly in terms of loading speed and annoying loading refreshes. It's ok to pontificate, but I don't see any suggestions from you on how to improve AI's worst in class performance.
Anyone can setup a proxy or edit the hosts file to map your advertiser to 127.0.0.1.
That proxy may even serve all local or remote iOS devices with a little speed compromise which is always preferable to slowdown caused by ads. So Safari content blockers in iOS 9.0 is neither the end of online ads nor is it the first solution on this issue.
So stop flaming the subject with unnecessarily hot articles and let people enjoy their online life.
Apple Insider has a huge opportunity here. You are hearing the collective rage of your "customers", and if you listen, will benefit immensely.
I don't think you need an alternative model, just choose advertising assets that load quickly and are not intrusive. Size limited banners and/or text ads that don't take up 3/4 of each page would probably work.
Apple Insider can freeze up my Firefox page on Windows 10. So I don't go there anymore from my PC. So you're losing anyway, but it's not Apple's fault, it your own.
I really hope you do something about it, because I like your site.
Back in the old days ads were paid for with click through. When sites got popular the aggregators started paying by impression. I would guess that most of the regulars here would never click on an ad anyway. My suggestion is to white list AI and then use my ad killer script which I have posted before. That way AI gets their impressions and user can instantly remove them for a clean reading experience. The script is so simple to use it is very convenient.
This article is just another fundamental misunderstanding of the issue. Ads are not the issue. Tracking is the issue. These should be called Tracking Blockers. Certain types of ads are just the payload used for tracking.
Bought Peace and deleted it as soon as I heard the news! Some people just can't figure out what they want to do with their lives ...
I bought 4 other "content blockers" plus "weBlock" which I've been using for a long time.
Result?
They still don't "clean" things up on my iDevices but much better to browse, focus and read articles ... and save my expensive data plan here in Canada.
Just look at our own good AI main page. Holy crap! "Accidentally", I browsed there with no content blocker ... why you have to repeat the same Ad multiple times and left and right and so big and shiny?? One is not enough?!!
Many times, I clicked on some image to see the bigger one but ended up on Amazon! WTH!
And then, we have iMore which their trackers follow my a$$ until I stop browsing!
All in the name of authors who need to make a living .... and don't give damn to "Do Not Track Me"!
On the same note, I would still delete Peace even if it was around using Ghostery:
P.S. Blame all this on google as we all know how it all started. Android users all have one or more blocking tools already. google knows it too but didn't care because it was us, iOS users, who were paying their bills to maintain their crappy android OS for FREE to anything that moves and knows how to build a stupid dumb android device.
Actually, TV ads can tell a lot about what type of shows you watch but the thing I'm surprised about is how upset people are over tracking? Why are the not upset over things like what the banks and credit card companies know? Loyalty cards are the worst. If you don't believe me, check out this article from 2012. Target. You can only imagine how much more sophisticated things have become in over 3 years.
Wrong. Privacy has been encroached on in certain areas, and in each of those the fight is very much still on. Most people don't fight in wars, they emote from their couches after reading the news about it.
Privacy is going to win. The issues have been targeted on a number of front, and the momentum is with the opposition. Advertisers have to make retailers happy, and retailers will flip on a dime to make their shoppers happy. You want proof?
There's nothing stopping content creators from putting up images on their sites, those images can be ads. It's the sneaky invisible, obtrusive tracking and script bullshit that's going to be extincted.
Micro targeted advertising isn't as effective as its peddlers would like advertisers to believe, the trend away from it started a few years ago. The exodus of major advertisers away from Google ads has already been in progress. What we have now is just those peddling it have just gotten more aggressive and desperate. The current level of invasive tactics is just panic reaction before the death spiral.
This article is just another fundamental misunderstanding of the issue. Ads are not the issue. Tracking is the issue. These should be called Tracking Blockers. Certain types of ads are just the payload used for tracking.
That got me to thinking. I'm usually not too concerned about tracking because I don't ever experience any harm from an ad on my computer. What I just now thought of is on AI forums the thumbs up icon is gray if you have posted so theoretically a tracker, using JS, could find the username of the person, then visit their profile page and glean additional information. A bot then could also search your entire post history.
get used to it, get ready for it, or get run over by it.
I can’t recall a single time in history in which the people saying this have been in the right, and this doesn’t break the standard. Ad-supported content will always be around. I just want to be able to block it.
get used to it, get ready for it, or get run over by it.
I can’t recall a single time in history in which the people saying this have been in the right, and this doesn’t break the standard.
The end of slavery, women's suffrage, desegregation, interracial marriage, and the acknowledgement that homosexuality is a part of nature, all come to mind.
Took a suggestion from several AI readers and tried Crystal. So far, so good. I'll experiment with it for awhile and see if my monthly data usage drops. Battery life is a little harder to quantify but I checked in system prefs to see how much battery Safari uses before enabling crystal so we'll see how it shakes out.
Took a suggestion from several AI readers and tried Crystal. So far, so good. I'll experiment with it for awhile and see if my monthly data usage drops. Battery life is a little harder to quantify but I checked in system prefs to see how much battery Safari uses before enabling crystal so we'll see how it shakes out.
It would be nice to see battery and performance tests with these blockers enabled.
Comments
Everybody suggests finding an alternative revenue stream but never offer any feasible suggestions. Advertising is a way of earning money without asking the content consumer for any money and it scales with content popularity, what else offers that? People will only pay money in return for something.
People say they'd pay subscriptions but it would be a fraction of the number who use an ad-supported model. There are forum members here who are millionaires, even billionaires and even they likely wouldn't pay for it because it's like any value system. You weigh up how much you'd be willing to pay for what you get in return. A forum about Apple is a relatively special interest site. Loads of people have Apple products but they don't want to talk about Apple because Apple's a business. You're also not paying to express your opinion, you can do that for free, you do it to hear other opinions. But people don't like to hear opinions they disagree with so they won't pay for that and if the interest group is narrowed, it further shrinks the revenue potential. A dozen people paying $5 per year to hear their own opinions reaffirmed isn't a business model.
It also has to be a subscription. You have to think about what is being paid for. The revenue for blogs is to pay for someone to work constantly. You can't pay once off and have them work forever, they need to earn money every single year. If there's a team of 6 staff and they each have to earn a minimum of $20k per year, that's $120k of revenue every single year on top of operational costs. If you had people paying $5 per year, you'd need 24,000 subscribers to pay their salaries. If you look at the active member counts, this site has hundreds of people in total but only a couple of dozen who are not just guest members, it'll be more in total but that gives a rough guide:
http://forums.appleinsider.com/users/online
If the members were only full active members, it would be about 3 orders of magnitude short on revenue. This is why sites have become so laden with advertising because even a single ad stream isn't enough. It's also why you see special interest sites being closed down because the interest for the content isn't high enough to cover costs. This has happened with all the Mac magazines.
This is the same issue that has been facing the music industry with streaming. Advertising isn't paying enough when it's just put in as an addon because you can see how much it costs to buy advertising, that's the only money going into the system. John Gruber's site which was mentioned in the thread has a more exclusive revenue model:
http://thenextweb.com/us/2010/02/20/daring-fireball-money-machine/
He makes advertising exclusive to select advertisers and this is a direct form of advertising to 150k readers. If you have the reader volume then you can get away with less advertising and advertisers clearly value having a prominent placement. If your ad just sits in amongst a dozen others then it lowers the possibility someone will notice it. That site is also only funding one person.
If Gruber was an editor at AI and brought his subscriber base with him then this site could probably get rid of all but his own advertising model but he likely wouldn't do that because he's making it all for himself just now and would have little to gain.
This problem has all arisen from a trend that I mentioned in another thread about gaming, which is that over time, consumers have been conditioned to devalue soft-content. Consumers don't want to pay high prices for software like Adobe, they don't want to be paying $60 for games, they don't want to pay for music where $0.99 per track is too much and they don't want to pay at all for news. This coincides with a poor economy where people don't have much disposable income. The value of every product from a car to a home to a computer is based on a perception of worth with the minimum being based on the human cost that goes into making the product. With soft-content, the human cost is extremely variable. A team of 20 highly efficient producers can make a soft product that rivals 1000 inefficient ones. When it's a blog article from one person, it's given almost no value because you typing a reply can seem like just as much work and this is especially true if you disagree with the article. You essentially gained nothing from it and people don't like to pay for things that don't give them a return on their investment.
This website is the absolute worst, by far, that I visit regularly in terms of loading speed and annoying loading refreshes. It's ok to pontificate, but I don't see any suggestions from you on how to improve AI's worst in class performance.
You can hold the reload arrow in the url bar to load a page without content blocking.
You cannot prevent ad blocking.
Anyone can setup a proxy or edit the hosts file to map your advertiser to 127.0.0.1.
That proxy may even serve all local or remote iOS devices with a little speed compromise which is always preferable to slowdown caused by ads. So Safari content blockers in iOS 9.0 is neither the end of online ads nor is it the first solution on this issue.
So stop flaming the subject with unnecessarily hot articles and let people enjoy their online life.
I don't think you need an alternative model, just choose advertising assets that load quickly and are not intrusive. Size limited banners and/or text ads that don't take up 3/4 of each page would probably work.
Apple Insider can freeze up my Firefox page on Windows 10. So I don't go there anymore from my PC. So you're losing anyway, but it's not Apple's fault, it your own.
I really hope you do something about it, because I like your site.
And yet I don’t respect him one iota, nor is someone who destroys something good like this “conscientious” at all.
Sorry, but no.
No print or tv ad tracks where I was before, were I go next, how long I look at it, how fast I scroll etc. The comparison is just plain wrong.
Perhaps not entirely. The TV ads themselves don't track you, of course,
but I'm pretty sure data from your cable box (if you have one) is commoditized.
Good comparison, otherwise.
This article is just another fundamental misunderstanding of the issue. Ads are not the issue. Tracking is the issue. These should be called Tracking Blockers. Certain types of ads are just the payload used for tracking.
Bought Peace and deleted it as soon as I heard the news! Some people just can't figure out what they want to do with their lives ...
I bought 4 other "content blockers" plus "weBlock" which I've been using for a long time.
Result?
They still don't "clean" things up on my iDevices but much better to browse, focus and read articles ... and save my expensive data plan here in Canada.
Just look at our own good AI main page. Holy crap! "Accidentally", I browsed there with no content blocker ... why you have to repeat the same Ad multiple times and left and right and so big and shiny?? One is not enough?!!
Many times, I clicked on some image to see the bigger one but ended up on Amazon! WTH!
And then, we have iMore which their trackers follow my a$$ until I stop browsing!
All in the name of authors who need to make a living .... and don't give damn to "Do Not Track Me"!
On the same note, I would still delete Peace even if it was around using Ghostery:
http://lifehacker.com/ad-blocking-extension-ghostery-actually-sells-data-to-a-514417864
P.S. Blame all this on google as we all know how it all started. Android users all have one or more blocking tools already. google knows it too but didn't care because it was us, iOS users, who were paying their bills to maintain their crappy android OS for FREE to anything that moves and knows how to build a stupid dumb android device.
Wrong. Privacy has been encroached on in certain areas, and in each of those the fight is very much still on. Most people don't fight in wars, they emote from their couches after reading the news about it.
Privacy is going to win. The issues have been targeted on a number of front, and the momentum is with the opposition. Advertisers have to make retailers happy, and retailers will flip on a dime to make their shoppers happy. You want proof?
There's nothing stopping content creators from putting up images on their sites, those images can be ads. It's the sneaky invisible, obtrusive tracking and script bullshit that's going to be extincted.
Micro targeted advertising isn't as effective as its peddlers would like advertisers to believe, the trend away from it started a few years ago. The exodus of major advertisers away from Google ads has already been in progress. What we have now is just those peddling it have just gotten more aggressive and desperate. The current level of invasive tactics is just panic reaction before the death spiral.
And yet I don’t respect him one iota, nor is someone who destroys something good like this “conscientious” at all.
Sorry, but no.
something good like... advertising? technology, like rust, never sleeps.
ad-supported content is dying. it's dying online, on TV and in print. its dying like buggy whips died.
you can still sell buggy whips today. some people buy them. most people dont.
get used to it, get ready for it, or get run over by it.
That got me to thinking. I'm usually not too concerned about tracking because I don't ever experience any harm from an ad on my computer. What I just now thought of is on AI forums the thumbs up icon is gray if you have posted so theoretically a tracker, using JS, could find the username of the person, then visit their profile page and glean additional information. A bot then could also search your entire post history.
Is this the reason for the one two punch by Apple?
Apple support ads with iAds. It's seems to be an important business for the company.
I just don't think Apple is attacking the industry's revenue source, but I do think the company is protecting its users from googles malicious acts.
something good like... advertising?
A blocker OF advertising...
get used to it, get ready for it, or get run over by it.
I can’t recall a single time in history in which the people saying this have been in the right, and this doesn’t break the standard. Ad-supported content will always be around. I just want to be able to block it.
The end of slavery, women's suffrage, desegregation, interracial marriage, and the acknowledgement that homosexuality is a part of nature, all come to mind.
It would be nice to see battery and performance tests with these blockers enabled.