This means that articles published within the Apple News app will feature ads which generate iAd revenues, while the mobile version on Safari might get its ads cut off – a strategy which could be considered anti-competitive.
With a content blocker enabled, iPhone users can also expect web pages to load faster. As such, the Cupertino company has taken to helping a cottage industry of adblockers take the fight to Google, and these adblockers have already skyrocketed to the top of the App Store charts.
This lack of nuance has already given the developer of the most popular iOS 9 ad blocker a serious case of coder’s remorse. And if we’ve learned anything from the rise of native advertising, it’s that the “Vogue effect” – in which great advertising enhances the value of the publisher’s offering – is applicable in digital media, too. Research from Sourcepoint and comScore shows one in 10 people were blocking ads on desktops and laptops before the Apple update, rising to around a quarter in Germany and France.
Tech Crunch reports that there are a swarm of ad-blocking apps still in development, many poised to arrive soon.
Apple’s latest mobile operating system iOS9 is here. For years, marketers treated the internet in much the same way they handled all of their offline advertising, pushing out their messaging and hoping consumers would notice it. But just as consumers flipped past print ads or went to the kitchen during commercial breaks, banner blindness became the norm online. “However, we’ve been accustomed to innovation and technology disrupting the publishing business from every angle for a long time”. “Is it more existential?” “As a publisher you are relatively powerless, your key revenue generator is being undermined”. That’s equivalent to 14% of its 2014 revenue. However, there is much suspicion of the company’s motives.
Apple’s move is a double-barrelled effort to boost the health of the so-called app economy while undermining arch rival Google, which dominates the online advertising market. Jarvis puts it more bluntly: “Apple has basically failed at the ad business and they are trying to ruin it for everybody else”.
Google’s Safe Browsing allows third parties to use the company’s extensive, up-to-date compendium of “suspected phishing, malware, and unwanted software pages”.
Some kind of menu, as in a more explicit contract, where we can actually see what we’re going to eat before it’s shoved down our throats? “You need to do what you can to attack the root”, says Hartman. “Don’t hold the user hostage with long pre-rolls and pop-ups”. For example, AOL said it did not see any noticeable traffic declines over the weekend, despite the fact that Apple began approving ad-blocking apps on Wednesday. While autoplay video ads may work in some mobile in-stream environments where a consumer can swipe them off the scream quickly, it may be time to retire autoplay in other contexts.
Publishers aren’t just sitting back and waiting to see what happens with ad blocking.
Then there are the walled gardens created by others. Rather than complain about Apple allowing ad-blocking tools that squeeze Google’s mobile revenue, Google could provide a highly valuable, nearly unique tool to prevent harm. Another solution for this is that advertisers and publishers should find new ways of delivering ads without the potential of ruining the user experience.
There could, though, be one unintended outcome of the ad blocking that would be welcomed by many veterans in the sales departments of newspapers and magazines.
Ad blockers are responsible for extenuating these problems but sometimes they may turn users into freeloaders-getting goods without “paying” for them with their attention, personal information, and ultimately, ad clicks.
“And there is an added benefit that this move will hurt their competitors more than them”. Scalable ads will have to be replaced by more handcrafted native ads. “We will have a business in some way, shape or form”.