iOS 9 Safari content blockers debut to demand, denouncement & a high-profile delisting

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  • Reply 181 of 421
    mstonemstone Posts: 11,510member
    crowley wrote: »
    Apple take the payment (and take their 30%) and keep the customer information.  How is Marco supposed to refund the customers directly?

    I read that he is offering a full refund.
  • Reply 182 of 421
    Quote:

     But anyone who believes they are entitled to simply block ads across the board and deprive publications and their staff of advertising revenue and their very livelihood is flat-out wrong.


     

     

    I don't think you can say that it's 'flat out wrong', notwithstanding of course that ethics have been a hot philosophical topic for 2,500 years and does not look like it will be resolved any time soon.

     

    When sites want to display a 30 second video ad before a 30 second new clip, I will mute the sound and scroll it off the page till it's finished. I just don't want to have ads shoved in my face, if they are going to shove ads in the faces of people like me, it most certainly is not going to make me buy anything. The whole ad situation with impressions and clicks and tracking is completely mad, the industry is going to have to submit to a complete shakedown and come up with an entirely new model.

     

    The current model is simply the old newsprint model, but updated with the technological possibilities of tracking and specialised ad serving, rather than  being thought out for a new paradigm. Frankly if 70% of sites that have the same content had to disappear then that would not be a bad thing.

     

    I have to applaud Apple for once again using their power for good rather than evil and forcing what will inevitably be a paradigm shift in online advertising and tracking, after a painful period of soul searching and hand wringing.

  • Reply 183 of 421
    Quote:



    Originally Posted by scottyo View Post



    Stop trying to make it a moral issue. It's an economic issue.



    I'm under no obligation, moral or otherwise, to make YOUR business plan succeed. If you can't make it work, do something else productive.

    If no one else hasn't made that comparison, there are some similarities to tipping. 

     

    But regardless, pay-per-click is not capturing the full effect of ads (and might attract the more unpleasant kinds of ads). I cannot remember a single instance that I have ever clicked on an add and actually bought something (and even the number of instances I just clicked for curiosity is probably a single digit number). But ads definitely have influenced my awareness of various products and have let to me spending money, just not by clicking on the ad but by me directly searching for a particular product or brand. 

  • Reply 184 of 421
    crowleycrowley Posts: 10,453member
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by mstone View Post





    I read that he is offering a full refund.

    He is, but you need to apply via Apple.  According to some, that's "passing the buck".

  • Reply 185 of 421
    Originally Posted by digitalclips View Post

    It is simply called Adblock and it is in the App Store. The o is a no entry sign.



    And you don’t mind having to install their certificate to get the blocking?

  • Reply 186 of 421
    I think I am unlike some of the other folks posting. I want calmer controlled ads, sure. But I want to be tracked a bit. Not data kept relative to me, but I am interested in certain things. The thing I find very odd is when I guy something and I keep getting ads for it. Duh. Why would that happen (Amazon)? If AppleInsider or the NY Times or others need ads to survive, I would much much much rather they be relevant to me! I won't consider an ad blocker yet, but I know the ads seem to be getting more invasive, so there is a tipping point where I might. Unless, mind you, non-invasive ads about things I am interested in and only those come my way. So track me, but do it well without invading my privacy by keeping data about me stored somewhere along the Columbia River. :-)
  • Reply 187 of 421
    freerange wrote: »
    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.

    one thing AI could do -- learn how to properly optimize images and stop using PNGs for product photos.
  • Reply 188 of 421
    Marvin wrote: »
    One thing I found on loading the forum rather than the main page was it loaded over 4MB vs ~1MB and in Safari's inspector, the following tiny image showed up as 3.5MB, if you drag it to the Finder you can see the size of it, that should be about 1/1000th the size:

    http://forums-cdn.appleinsider.com/f/f4/70x70px-ZC-f4c9c066_1275818098_iPhone5White.jpeg

    That kind of thing that will slow down page loading and will burn through data allowances. I'm not sure who deals with things like that and I'm not sure how you even make a 70 pixel square JPEG come out that large. On mobile devices, this kind of thing would have more of an effect.

    I've noticed many images with similar problems. how, exactly, does a website operator specializing in technology, not know even the basics of web technology? that thing which is their chosen profession.

    I suspect the answer to that is related to the larger problem -- not giving a shit enough to do things properly.
  • Reply 189 of 421

    With all the hand-wringing among the "news" media sites about the end of "free" content, I have yet to read one that mentioned the fact that ad networks ranging from AOL to Google's DoubleClick to Yahoo have been hacked and distributed malware through Flash ads.

     

    Is this some dirty little secret or is it being covered over because it provides a genuine reason for using ad blockers?

     

    Are these sources false? 

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/27/malvertising_feature/ 

    http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/19/6537511/google-ad-network-exposed-millions-of-computers-to-malware

    http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/08/technology/security/malvertising-huffington-post/

     

    What responsibility do web site publishers take for what gets distributed through ads on their sites?

  • Reply 190 of 421
    One more thought. Beware the law of unintended consequences, which loves to apply itself with a bite. I only see two outcomes. Sites I like disappear as the authors watch income disappear. Or a new model of invasive ads works its way in.
  • Reply 191 of 421
    misa wrote: »
    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.)

    if your sites eliminate the content and give me a nastygram, guess what I'm doing next?
  • Reply 192 of 421
    kiowavt wrote: »
    One more thought. Beware the law of unintended consequences, which loves to apply itself with a bite. I only see two outcomes. Sites I like disappear as the authors watch income disappear. Or a new model of invasive ads works its way in.

    or sites with a bloated staff of six fail and smaller, tighter sites survive. Mark Gurman is carrying 9to5M, he could run a smaller site and survive.
  • Reply 193 of 421
    jdw wrote: »
    None of the ad blockers even function on 32-bit CPU iPads, like my iPad3..

    AdBlock works just fine on my first gen iPad Mini. It's 32-bit.

    nolamacguy wrote: »
    if your sites eliminate the content and give me a nastygram, guess I'm doing next?

    Quoted for truth.
  • Reply 194 of 421
    dunksdunks Posts: 1,254member
    Wait... So Marco pulled support for his app within 2 days of taking $3.79 from users and posted how to "apply for a refund" on his blog where 99% of the people who were duped into paying him money won't ever read it. That's incredibly lame.
  • Reply 195 of 421
    MacProMacPro Posts: 19,718member

    And you don’t mind having to install their certificate to get the blocking?

    Nope. Anything I can do to help decimate Google's income.
  • Reply 196 of 421

    I admire and respect Appleinsider as a tech news content provider and do not wish them ill. I do not want to deprive them of their necessary revenue to continue their production. However, I use ad-blockers. 

     

    I despise ads. I use that word as the strongest one I can think of that is acceptable for polite company. But that has not brought me to the point of using an ad-blocker. 

     

    I consider advertisers' tracking of users and then selling that data to be immoral and evil. That has inclined me to be sympathetic towards ad-blockers. 

     

    But the reason I use ad-blockers now is security, pure and simple. Ad networks have become a VERY significant vector for delivering malware. If I am self-serving in my use of ad-blockers it is in the sense that I will do all in my power to lock down my electronic devices to reduce or prevent further exposure to those criminal element who seek to misuse MY hardware, MY identity, MY data. 

     

    It is unfortunate that content providers are suffering, but the responsibility lies not at Apple's door for providing the security tools, nor at the users' for taking advantage of every tool available to protect ourselves. The fault is with the criminals for their crime, and the ad networks for refusing to take any measures to secure their networks and prevent them from being used as malware distribution providers. 

     

    Appleinsider is in the same position as so many other industries that have had to face changing business models because of the fluctuating nature of internet communication and commerce. I do not have a good solution to offer but I remain confident that as long as ad networks refuse to secure their networks ad-blockers will be a growing necessity, in addition to something to protect ourselves from immoral practices. 

  • Reply 197 of 421
    crowleycrowley Posts: 10,453member
    dunks wrote: »
    Wait... So Marco pulled support for his app within 2 days of taking $3.79 from users and posted how to "apply for a refund" on his blog where 99% of the people who were duped into paying him money won't ever read it. That's incredibly lame.
    The app did not stop working, and the refund process is the normal Apple refund process. What more did you expect him to do? He has no access to customer details.
  • Reply 198 of 421
    kiowavt wrote: »
    One more thought. Beware the law of unintended consequences, which loves to apply itself with a bite. I only see two outcomes. Sites I like disappear as the authors watch income disappear. Or a new model of invasive ads works its way in.

    Unintended consequence? It's not a butterfly effect if web sites go under because their revenue streams dry up. Some will adapt, but many won't.
  • Reply 199 of 421
    misamisa Posts: 827member
    nolamacguy wrote: »
    if your sites eliminate the content and give me a nastygram, guess I'm doing next?

    That's the point. Plenty of people have installed ADP because their more tech-savvy friend installed it for them without even explaining what it does. There's also plenty of people who don't even know how ADP works. There are sites that straight-up break because of ADP being present because ADP blindly blocks certain DOM elements. For example any css element starting with "ad" like "adventure" gets blocked.

    So if I politely want you to turn ADP off, I'll enclose the entire content in a known css element id so that you have to turn ADP off. If you're a smartass, you'd realize you can whitelist the site itself and continue to block everything but the in-house ads. In fact the most profitable site I manage does this. If you browse the site with ADP turned on, only one of the in-house ads show, and it has a much higher click-through rate.

    So, yes, people who install ADP are missing much more than just advertisements.
  • Reply 200 of 421

    Or the p?eudo writers will disapeer and you'll be back to the best content getting money through subscription, mix of subscription and tasteful ads (like old time Newspapers and radio) or a curated experience with a bit more ads, but a lot less than we have now.

     

    The crap content which can't make money in any of those 3 ways will vanish, or be the lot of people who don't want to pay for anything and are not discerning in the quality of the media they consume. They'll still be crap, but just less of it as the money pie for them will be smaller.

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