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."

Comments

They are the pirates

[fustakrakich]

They're stealing my time, and electricity

Re:They are the pirates

[MightyMartian]

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".

Re:They are the pirates

[Anubis IV]

Add bandwidth, attention, and enjoyment to that list too.

And what their analogy fails to capture is that when it comes to CDs, movies, fruit, toys, or anything else they want to compare it against, there's a simple, well-established relationship between consumers and producers: stuff gets produced -> a price is agreed on -> price gets paid -> stuff gets consumed. Not so with web pages, since the reader pays for the goods (e.g. allows cookies to be set, allows tracking scripts to run, sends information about themselves, has their information sold to third-parties, etc.) before they've had a chance to find out what the price is or see what the goods are.

Marco Arment suggested that the practice was akin to a restaurant charging its patrons for food they looked over in the menu, before they had even ordered, and I'm inclined to agree. What ability do I have to say, "no, your product is not worth the price you're asking" if the tracking cookies and scripts are immediately placed and executed upon my arrival? Where are sites spelling out the price that visitors pay in a place that visitors can see before they pay (and no, burying it in fine print on page 26 of a privacy policy does not count)? Where do they get off thinking that a contract of adhesion has any sort of enforceability when they never even offered me a chance to take it or leave it? Moreover, where even in those contracts do they state that I'm required to make my information available to them or to consume everything that they're making freely available? I eat around inedible food that restaurants serve me (e.g. burnt edges), so why wouldn't I
"eat around" non-content data that's served up, such as tracking scripts?

I don't tear the ads out of the local newspapers I read that are given away for free (I also don't have to worry about them tracking me or compiling data on me that they'll sell to the highest bidders), but should I choose to do so, I would be well within my legal rights, since the item was made freely available for me to read as I want. So it is with sites published online. And because they are engaging in tracking and other practices with which I do not agree, and because they are not forthcoming with the details regarding how my data will be used, and because they've provided me with no means for working it out with them, and because I am within my legal rights to refuse to accept or provide data to them, I have absolutely no problem stripping tracking content and ads from those pages.

All of which is to say, publishers engaging in these practices: stop treating the people you need like your enemy and find a business model that aligns our interests. Otherwise you'll go the way of every other dinosaur company that failed to adapt.

"That's stealing..." No it isn't.

[Anonymous Coward]

If they want to claim that as stealing then they should pay us for the bandwidth THEY are stealing.

Re:"That's stealing..." No it isn't.

[bondsbw]

They obviously don't know how HTTP works. I issue a command on my computer that connects to their server. They voluntarily send me back some data and tell me what kind it is, so I can make a decision about what to do with it (i.e. render as a web site, interpret/run JS code, show it as plain text a la "view source", save the bytes to my hard drive, 3D-print the bytes as chew toys for my dog, etc.).

If you want to require my usage of the data that your server freely gives away to be constrained, then I need to sign a contract of some kind. Or you need to not send the data. But failing those options, what I do with data that you push to me is is my decision and not yours... if that means I selectively do not render your ads, then so be it.

Not surprised. Was my first download too.

[Anonymous Coward]

Crystal offered their product for free for literally less than a day but I snapped it up in time.

Holy shit. It's like the first time you discovered adblock+ on your desktop. Suddenly surfing is fast and, well, useful.

Fucking advertisers are especially aggressive on mobile because they know their audience is captive and less skilled. If, as a species, we spent half as much time as it took to research how to make predictive ad slide right the fuck under your thumb before you tap the screen in to medical research we'd have cured fucking cancer by now. (I'm looking right the fuck at you slashdot on mobile. In-line adds for fermium shitware skinnerbox games and hovering banners? Fuck this place has fallen since the 90s)

This is a real coup for apple. Think you'll ever see operating system supported ad blockers on the play store? Fat fucking chance!

Advertisers have to realize...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Stealing?

[chilenexus]

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.

Re: Ironic coming from ./ since there's 16 ads...

[fisted]

Huh? I count zero. Oh, maybe it's because of the ad blocker.....

If ad blocking is "stealing"...

[Anonymous Coward]

If ad blocking is considered "stealing" then most of these "ads" should be considered "hacking" and ad companies and executives, especially the ones that end up serving exploits, should be prosecuted just as aggressively as Aaron Swartz and others.

If you don't buy the things in ads,you're a slouch

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

I'm still not sure how they convinced sharing music where no one loses is stealing, but some people think it is stealing even though the distribution costs are basically 0. Anyway, if they can pull another fast one and convince people that not watching ads is stealing, they'll want to go the extra mile,"If you watch your content without buying stuff our sponsors promote, you're basically stealing free content.". Don't buy into their mind poison.

Publishers need to be responsible

[sl149q]

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.

Re:Publishers need to be responsible

[BuckaBooBob]

With so much malware being pushed from shady advertising sources your crazy not to block them...

Running without a ad blocker is more akin to walking around with a open wound in a infectious area than stealing music ect...

Re:Publishers need to be responsible

[amicusNYCL]

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.

Re:Publishers need to be responsible

[zieroh]

You win the internets today, sir.

So for all the ad providers

[LynnwoodRooster]

The iPhone doesn't just work...

Welcome to the club ...

[MacTO]

Ad blockers are pretty much a necessity on mobile networks.

Don't feel guilty about using them either. Ads cost real money on mobile networks because they eat into your quota. They also degrade your device's performance and track your behaviour. Don't dismiss that last point as the cost of free services. While the network is public, your device is private. You should have the right to control which network requests your device does and does not make, as well as control which code executes on it. All of this talk about ads funding websites and behaviour tracking being used to improve the relevance of ads is pure nonsense. If it was about funding websites with relevant ads, they would simply display ads based upon the content of the website.

In App ad blocking

[greggman]

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 $$$