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One Day After iOS 9's Launch, Ad Blockers Top Apple's App Store
HughPickens.com writes: Sarah Perez reports at TechCrunch that only one day after the release of Apple's newly released version of Apple's mobile operating system, iOS 9, ad blockers are topping the charts in the App Store and it seems that new iOS 9 users are thrilled to have access to this added functionality. The Top Paid iOS app is the new ad-blocker Peace, a $2.99 download from Instapaper founder Marco Arment. Peace currently supports a number of exclusive features that aren't found in other blockers yet. Most notably, it uses Ghostery's more robust blocklist, which Arment licensed from the larger company by offering them a percentage of the app's revenue. "I can't believe how many trackers are on popular sites," says Arment. "I can't believe how fast the web is without them." Other ad blockers are also topping the paid app chart as of today, including the Purify Blocker (#3), Crystal (#6), Blockr (#12). (Ranks as of the time of writing.) With the arrival of these apps, publishers and advertisers are fretting about the immediate impact to their bottom lines and business, which means they'll likely soon try to find ways to sneak around the blockers. In that case, it should be interesting to see which of the apps will be able to maintain their high degree of ad blocking over time.
It's no surprise that advertisers and publishers who make their money from advertising aren't exactly fans of blockers. What is surprising is that no one seemed to disagree with the argument that online ads have gotten out of control. "I think if we don't acknowledge that, we'd be fools," says Scott Cunningham, "So does that mean ad blockers are good or right? Absolutely not. Do we have an accountability and responsibility to address these things? Absolutely — and there's a lot that we're doing now." Harry Kargman agrees that in many cases, online ads have created "a bad consumer experience — from an annoyance perspective, a privacy perspective, a usability perspective." At the same time, Kargman says that as the industry works to solve these problems, it also needs to convince people that when you use an ad blocker, "That's stealing. It's no different than ripping music. It's no different than pirating movies."
It's no surprise that advertisers and publishers who make their money from advertising aren't exactly fans of blockers. What is surprising is that no one seemed to disagree with the argument that online ads have gotten out of control. "I think if we don't acknowledge that, we'd be fools," says Scott Cunningham, "So does that mean ad blockers are good or right? Absolutely not. Do we have an accountability and responsibility to address these things? Absolutely — and there's a lot that we're doing now." Harry Kargman agrees that in many cases, online ads have created "a bad consumer experience — from an annoyance perspective, a privacy perspective, a usability perspective." At the same time, Kargman says that as the industry works to solve these problems, it also needs to convince people that when you use an ad blocker, "That's stealing. It's no different than ripping music. It's no different than pirating movies."
If they want to claim that as stealing then they should pay us for the bandwidth THEY are stealing.
I'm NOT buying your product because you advertised it. I'm buying it because a friend told me it was good.
By blocking your ads, I'm freeing myself from the annoyance of advertisements that I'm going to completely ignore anyway, and I'm recovering both bandwidth and electricity that YOU are stealing from me, because the application developer whose app I am using decided their app wasn't good enough to be a pay app, and decided instead to steal from me to get money from you (the advertiser).
You have to realize that you are spending your advertising dollars on very ineffective advertising. Worse, you are directly harming your brand by advertising in such a negative, intrusive, and annoying way.
The problem is that publishers don't see the cost of delivery of their advertising. Like email spam there is little to no cost to throw in a few more lines of JavaScript to pull another ad from another ad delivery service.
But the consumers do see the cost. Download costs (especially for mobile) for the extra data. Longer time to load. Harder to read with ad's cluttering the page. Etc etc.
At the very least if this pushes publishers to convert 2nd and 3rd party ads to first party by (minimally proxying or caching) the delivery through their own site it will provide them with a better idea of the cost.
Moving more content to first party delivery allows protocols like SPDY to shine and optimize delivery. Faster and less bits (through compression.)
The message to publishers is take control of the data you want people to look at. Deliver it yourself.
The message to advertisers is to develop alternate mechanisms to ensure your ads are being delivered through first party sites. Ad blocking of crappy delivery mechanisms means that your choice is no ads or delivery as a first party ad.
It isn't fucking stealing at all. The content provider is putting up the content without a paywall. That I choose not to load all the elements of that page is not stealing, so I utterly reject the underlying assertion.
Quite frankly, if there is a Hell, then every marketer who has ever lived is either already getting Satan's trident up the ass, or should be preparing for an eternity of "sponsored rectal content".
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
So when will Apple let us block in app ads?
Oh I see. This isn't about blocking ads for user's. It's about Apple trying to get more devs to make apps and use iAds which are not blocked so Apple can make more $$$