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iOS 9 To Have Ad Blocking Capabilities

Posted by samzenpus on from the block-em dept.

An anonymous reader writes: iOS 9 will reportedly carry ad blocking capabilities for it's Safari browser when it is released later this year. The feature wasn't rolled out with the usual fanfare one might expect, and flew under the radar. ZDNet reports: "It's not immediately clear why the new ad-blocking privacy feature was included in iOS 9, due out later this year. After all, the iPhone and iPad maker has its own advertising network -- even if its success was limited (which is putting it nicely). What's clear is that allowing ad-blockers in iOS 9 could deliver a serious blow to Google, the biggest rival to Apple in the mobile space, because advertising remains a massive portion of the search giant's income."

5 of 161 comments (clear)

  1. Re:websites forced for two ad networks then by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 2, Informative

    > though, it might finally lead to ads being delivered from the same host as the rest of the content on the page

    This cannot be done. much of graphical and especially streaming content is from more robust "content delivery networks", such as Akamai, that host much larger proxies closer to the web browser's "final mile". Even modest icon or graphical content on a web page will overwhelm many corporate core web servers without these third-party hosted proxies, and it's especially true for ad content. Slashdot itself benefits from its extremely simple format, and can thus handle its load quite easily with quite modest resources. But if they tried to host the advertising content all on the same systems, I'm quite certain it would collapse the servers if not the firewalls themselves.

  2. iOS is the majority of Google's mobile revenue by WankerWeasel · · Score: 4, Informative

    iOS drives 75% of Google's mobile revenue meaning this could really hurt them depending on how much is blocked. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05...

  3. Re:simpler? exclusive ad channel? by jbolden · · Score: 3, Informative

    Apple does $231.5b in revenue. Paid apps revenue is $5.37b. So a couple percent. Advertising BTW is much smaller at $94.5m

  4. Re:simpler? exclusive ad channel? by vivaoporto · · Score: 3, Informative
    That's not what's in play here. Here is the same story with more sources, more technical information and without the Google vs. Apple flamebait angle:

    Adblocking is coming to the iPhone with iOS 9

    The next version of Safari will let users block ads on iPhones and iPads.

    With the roll-out of iOS 9, Apple is giving app developers an easy way to create mobile ad blockers for Safari on iPhones and iPads. The new "Content Blocking" feature allows developers to pass a JSON file with a set of rules for images, popups, cookies, resources and other elements in Safari.

    Sources like The Next Web point out that such a feature would allow ad blocking and privacy apps "to exist on iOS for the first time since launch".

    On the other hand the Marketing Land warns that this move "could chip away at Google's and other ad networks' mobile ad revenue from iOS devices", NiemanLab calls it "a blow for mobile advertising" and Cult of Mac asks if that is a good thing and proposes as an answer:

    Is that a good thing? Well, maybe for the average user, for a period of time. But when you block ads on the web, you prevent content providers from earning any revenue from them. If we all did that, our favorite sites would have to find other sources of revenue, or stop supplying content altogether.

    I have no idea why, in a technical and privacy oriented forum as ours, the focus of the accepted submission was not on the fact that this is an "Adblocker app enabler" move instead of a "Google killer move".

  5. Re: Including App Store ads? by danbob999 · · Score: 1, Informative

    One more reason to browse using Firefox which allows ad-blockers (at least on Android), unlike stock Android or iOS browsers.