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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."
It's stealing the same way that using the restroom when a TV show has a commercial break is stealing. Can they really blame people for defending themselves when they are constantly barraged with out-of-control ads that track users, install malware, block the actual content, and play difficult-to-stop audio that's not related to the actual content? I see them as no different than if the ads played before movies started showing up on the side walls of the theater while the movie is playing, and sometimes in the middle of the screen while the movie is still playing. And they send people into the theater to try and pick your pocket and leave ads in place of your wallet. Sure, the theater would make a good living taking money from those people for being allowed in - but they will still be driven out of business if all the customers stop showing up because of it.
Yup and unsolicited transmissions over mediums which incur a transmission cost for the recipient are illegal in the US, thanks to fax spammers. The loophole used by internet advertisers is that your browser, acting on your behalf, did solicit the content. The loophole used by we end users is that we can stop our browsers from doing so; and not requesting content will never be illegal.
Did they seriously compare not making a "legitimate" copy of their ad to making an illicit copy of a movie, as though they were the same thing?
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Exactly this, ads use my bandwidth, often most of the bandwidth when loading a site, along with my electricity to run on my computer and waste my time trying to mute or figure out how the hell to close them. Advertisers had the goose that laid the golden egg with much more targeted ads, with a largely captive audience and now have found a way to piss off consumers to the point where people are seeking out an extra program to block the adds because they have become such a pain in the ass.
Here is a clue to advertisers, you did this to yourselves by being obnoxious assholes, and once you are obnoxious assholes, that is it, people are done with you. You will go the way of the telemarketer, the email spammer etc. If you don't like it tough shit, you should have been responsible, created a responsible advertising union and gone after unfair, obnoxious advertisers yourself, because once you poison the well of consumers, you are all shit out of luck. Netflix would die if they try to add advertisements, Hulu, after years of resistance, is offering an add free experience; I may actually start a premium service with them now, but for years they didn't get my business because I HATE TV ads, they are a waste of my life. My time and attention is valuable, to me as well as advertisers, and I am willing to pay a reasonable fee rather than be forced to look at advertisements.
OTOH, I sometimes specifically go to youtube to check out movie trailers and game trailers or game/product reviews (this is a form of advertising). This is the future of advertising. I could give two shits about laundry detergent or toothpaste, I already have a brand I like, but for new purchases, I will often load a review video or go to Amazon and check out the reviews. The days of making a shit product and selling it with advertising are rapidly vanishing. I have been using ABP for years and will never stop, but if you make something I might buy, make it well and get youtubers to do some video reviews and get good reviews on Amazon by giving good customer service when your product fails (everything has a non-zero failure rate) and odds are good that I will buy your product.
Exactly! By using ad blockers we are not stealing from publishers or advertisers, we are stopping them from stealing from us! I paid for my computer and my internet access, and they are stealing from me by their out of control ads, and trying to track me!! Stealing the bandwidth and connection speed that I paid for with their ads that I do not want to see, My time and attention are too valuable to let the evil corporations steal them for their own profit, and my loss!
Also, ad servers have become an attack vector for viruses and malware, so blocking ads is also protecting ourselves from those attacks. No matter what warped view the advertisers and publishers spew, using ad blockers is not wrong nor immoral in any way! Using ad blockers is one way of protecting ourselves from not only viruses and malware, but from the evil intentions of the publishers and advertisers. And that their intentions are evil is not in question, it has been proven many times over!!
You know how some horror games have a Lovecraftian "sanity" meter?
Well when I get a full page popover, or I click on the screen randomly and am suddenly whisked to a page I did not expect - each of those events reduces my real life sanity meter. Out of control ad techniques are literally stealing my sanity.
A side effect is the support I once had for ads on websites has eroded to my not caring at all what the loss of ad revenue does to websites, to not caring at all if the web as a whole dies or is reduced to some pre-historic form.
My thought now is, if whatever ad you wanted to present was not in the initial HTML load it's fair game to be choosy about loading. I will whitelist sites I like a lot to help them out, but only if the ads there behave.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Running without a ad blocker is more akin to walking around with a open wound in a infectious area
I read an article a while ago about some scientist who decided that he wanted to go around investigating a certain species of leech that lives inside a hippo's butt, like attached directly to the colon. He suggested that, as big as the hippo is, it probably wasn't really all that aware that the leeches are even in its butt, but that's where the leech likes to be because there's a good source of blood there for the leech to feed on.
Now, the scientist is probably right, the hippo probably goes its whole life not really knowing that it has all these leeches in its butt. It might feel a little pain in the butt, but the hippo probably isn't concerned with why that pain is there, much less how or even if it can get rid of it, it's just something that the hippo has always lived with. The hippo accepts that one of the facts of daily life is that you just need to live with some pain in your butt.
Now, imagine (and believe me, this is a hypothetical), if the hippo let someone root around inside its butt and remove every one of the leeches, and even stop any others from attaching. It might take a day or two to get used to and get back to normal, but the hippo would wake up one day and realize that it no longer has a pain in its butt. It can still do everything it used to do, it can frolic in the water, it can roam around and find the tender little pieces of grass, it can do that thing where it poops and swishes its tail around to spread it all over its neighbors, and it realizes that it can do all of those things it likes without having that pain in its butt.
Now, maybe the leeches could talk. Maybe the leeches talk to the hippos and they say things like, listen, hippo, my life cycle depends on you letting me get into your butt when you're in the water. I need to drink your blood and drop out some eggs, so that other leeches can be born and start the cycle all over again. It's not really a big price you pay, I mean sure, there's a little pain in your butt, but I need you to do this. If you want to get in the water, it's just something you have to deal with. It's the price of admission. If you get in the water without letting me in your butt, it's like you're stealing the water.
I bet that the hippo would hear that, and would still want to continue going about its day without any pain in its butt. I don't think the hippo would feel very sorry for the butt leech. Sure, maybe the butt leech contributes to the aquatic ecosystem, maybe its eggs or the dead leeches get eaten by other things and fertilize the grass that the hippo likes to eat. But, if the leeches weren't there, the grass would just find other nutrients. Even though the leech is trying to argue that it's a necessary part of this ecosystem, it's actually just a pain in the butt. In reality, despite what it tells everyone else, the major beneficiary of anything that the butt leech does is the actual butt leech.
Anyway, I just had a thought that advertisers kind of sound like hippo butt leeches.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
What part of "mobile site" (I was on my iPhone) did you not understand?
Well, how was GP supposed to know that it was a FApple? Firefox and Ad-Blocker on Android work just fine...mind you, the Slashdot mobile site design is somewhat clunky, but you can't fix that with a browser, unfortunately.