Creator of Top iOS Ad Blocker Pulls App After Two Days

An anonymous reader writes: One of the most important aspects of the iOS 9 launch was that ad blocking software is now allowed on the App Store. Ad blocking apps rocketed to the top of the store's rankings, led by Marco Arment's Peace. A day afterward, Arment talked about the cognitive dissonance he felt from having his software blocking the (admittedly well-behaving) ads on his own website. Now, Arment has pulled Peace from the App Store, saying its success "just doesn't feel good." He continues, "Ad blockers come with an important asterisk: while they do benefit a ton of people in major ways, they also hurt some, including many who don't deserve the hit. Peace required that all ads be treated the same — all-or-nothing enforcement for decisions that aren't black and white. This approach is too blunt, and Ghostery and I have both decided that it doesn't serve our goals or beliefs well enough. If we're going to effect positive change overall, a more nuanced, complex approach is required than what I can bring in a simple iOS app." Arment also posted a link with detailed instructions on how to get a refund, if you already bought the app.

Comments

Moral outrage!

[Austerity Empowers]

...over something most of us really don't care about. Even in full view of the fact that certain websites exist exclusively on ad based revenue and may stop existing if we are successful in blocking ads. Let them die or be replaced by something else.

Re:Moral outrage!

[tripleevenfall]

To me, this is the same argument as the argument for a la carte cable TV.

The cable companies, not wanting us to stop paying, cry "But a la carte means there will be fewer channels, because some won't survive a subscription basis!" Well, do we need those channels then? Why should they force me to subsidize Oprah's channel when I've no interest in watching it?

If a website doesn't provide content valuable enough to generate revenue or to be supported by the crowd, perhaps it doesn't have a good argument for its own existence?

Re: Moral outrage!

[Karlt1]

Marco Arment had no such issue with worrying about losing ad revenue.

1. The Deck ads that he uses are very tasteful, not intrusive and what good ads should be.

2. He is already rich - he was the first employee at Tumblr and made out pretty well from his equity when it was sold to Yahoo.

3. He also made some money from selling Instaper to another company after it was one of the early successful apps for IOS.

4. He created one of the most popular podcast apps for iOS - Overcast - and he posted his first year's income.

5. He has one of the most successful Apple related podcast (80,000 unique listeners) - Accidental Tech Podcast - it's only three people involved and going rates for a podcast with that number of listeners is at least $2500 per spot with four spots per episodes.

If he said he didn't feel morally right about it. I believe him.

Re:Moral outrage!

[SvnLyrBrto]

Thing is, there's a lot of good speciality channels that are hurt by this. Because now instead of subscribers, they have to compete for eyeballs. Which means instead of producing good programming, they have to produce popular programming. Which means what shows were previously just about certain subjects now have to add in "drama" and "conflict" because that stuff gets the eyeballs. (Think lowest common denominator).

Those specialty channels are still part of packages so far. But they've degenerated into a wasteland of reality garbage. Have you looked at the lineup of The Learning Channel lately? I dare you to justify those shows as educational or informational in any way. Pretty much all the the Discovery channel shows are junk not; as are those on the other channels owned by discovery. The Science Fiction channel is now Syfy and produces Sharknado and ECW wrestling instead of Battlestar Galactica and Stargate SG1. And you can't even make the joke that the History Channel should really be called the Hitler Channel anymore... not unless the Ice Road Truckers are really searching for a secret outpost of the Third Reich up in northern Canada.

Basically, the bleak future you describe is already here. So why not go ahead and decouple the packages and put those channels out of our misery?

Bad apples.

[sims 2]

Like how the saying goes a few bad apples can ruin the whole batch.

I don't mind unobtrusive ads but popunders,interstitials,click redirects and malware are too much.

I use an adblocker because of sites like those, however most blockers operate on a whitelist policy unless you go out of your way to not block the ads on a website they are blocked by default.

Sites that have polite advertising aren't being singled out they just happen to be collateral damage from a few bad apples.

Why pull instead of improve?

[SuperKendall]

If he found the blocker was blocking ad-networks he considered to be well-behaved, why not update the app to simply not allow blocking of ad-cblockers he felt were good citizens?

Instead by pulling the app, all that means is people will move to ad-blockers that are less concerned with the effects of blocking, and simply block everything outright.

His app, popular as it was, could have been a real voice for moderation in blocking, a reasonable compromise between advertising that is respectful and that which is not. What good did it do anyone by pulling it?

Re:Am i the only one...

[Penguinisto]

Not a conspiracy theorist or anything, but did Doubleclick recently write any big checks recently?

Re:Am i the only one...

[NotDrWho]

I would respect him more if he just said "Money. It was money."

"just doesn't feel good."

[Nutria]

Remind me to never, ever buy anything with an Apple logo on it.

Re:Am i the only one...

[flopsquad]

You are not the only one. If he called it quits earlier in the process, maybe. But you have to put a nontrivial amount of energy into developing a final product (that's worth a damn). Thats an awful lot of time to spend, creating something from the ground up, to suddenly develop moral qualms about it a few days after releasing the finished product.

So... after the time coding and testing, getting to a releasable product, he's just now realizing that a program he wrote to block ads indiscriminately... blocks ads indiscriminately? Like he didn't realize his own site was part of $everywhere_ads_are_served? And he's just now getting the "moral" implications of the code that he specifically wrote to do what it does?

Unfortunately giving him credit for being smarter than that means acknowledging the reasons he states may not be entirely truthful.

Bad Ads vs Good Ads

[gurps_npc]

Part of the problem is bad actors, which unfortunately are the majority. In my experience, ALL sound and video advertisements that start without you pushing play (as in I start a youtube video and it has an ad first), are by definition BAD ACTORS. - Don't they know some of us are bored at work and don't want to get caught by the boss?? :D

One of the new things I am seeing is ads that prevent you from scrolling away from them. Cracked has this kind of crap and it really pisses me off when I attempt to scroll past an ad and the ad prevents me from doing it until I close the ad by clicking on a small, hidden x.

Any attempt to prevent you from not seeing the advertisement is pretty much my definition of a bad actor. If a person is scrolling past your ad, they are not going to suddenly change their mind and watch because you stop them.

Re:Am i the only one...

[Anonymous Coward]

I would think that the mostly likely reason that he is getting more attention than he desires, the attention that he is getting takes too much time and too many brain-cycles away from what he wants to do with his life at this time.

Was not "bought off"

[SuperKendall]

It don't make any sense that money was at the root of his choice, at least not his being bought off.

For one thing, he was already making a lot of money outright, and could probably have raised prices.

For another, what good would it do to buy him off? There are a flood of content blockers now, you can't stuff that genie back in the bottle.

If you read his blog I think you'll find that he really does ave concerns that are not monetarily based. Those concerns making sense or not is another matter, but I'm pretty sure the choice to pull the app had nothing do with with him being paid to do so..

Re:Was not "bought off"

[mobby_6kl]

Maybe he was bought off by not having his legs broken with baseball bats.

Re:Am i the only one...

[NatasRevol]

Especially since the database he was using was from Ghostery. So testing on the desktop would reveal obvious & easy issues, like blocking a revenue source, early on in the development.

Of course, none of the content people want to talk about the cost to users (security/tracking, bandwidth fees, viruses, autoplay ads). They only want to talk about the negative to THEIR pocketbooks. Very hypocritical of them. I've had several of them block me for pointing it out because they just can't see through their own point of views.

For users it's black and white that ads = malware

[Sarusa]

All ad networks serve up malware at multiple times. All of them. They can't help it. The Russians are more devious than they are, and more motivated - text-only ads are less dangerous, but even those have been compromised with scripting holes.

So as a user, you have to block ads or get pwned - removing Flash and Java helps a lot, but it's not sufficient.

Move to a Patreon or other microsubscription model - Dave Kellett (Sheldon) just did so after a bit of user request. He already had a Patreon, but wasn't highlighting it and was still running ads. So he did a 'replace the ads' drive and now I believe he's up to enough supporters to get rid of ads entirely. I subscribe to sites like Ars Technica for the same reason - I want to support them but am not willing to view their ads.

Then there's the entirely separate issue of bloat, like The Verge's terrible pages which are 10000 : 1 crap to content. But that's secondary to the malware.

Re:Am i the only one...

[BitZtream]

I think it does.

Its not that he didn't know his website's ads would be blocked, its that he didn't realize how dramatic the effect would be for his revenue stream.

Once he realized that it would crush his revenue stream completely, he then realized that 'hey ... blocking all ads may not be the best idea, it might actually be bad for some people and legitimate products because ... I'M ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE IT HURT'

He just had a realization when he felt the effects himself. When he realized he was shafting himself out of cash when he wasn't being an 'evil advertiser' or anything, he realized that he was nuking it from space instead of maybe a pistol or two.

Sometimes we don't immediately fully realize the effect we have on others until we see it directly for ourselves. Thats all this was.

Responsible advertising

[fyngyrz]

The problem is not advertising. The problem is the mechanisms that are in use. Responsible advertising can be done easily -- just source the image or text from your own website. Don't send the user's browser haring all over the intertubes, track them, or otherwise do anything except talk about, and link to, the product being sold.

There are a lot of invested people out there right now that are trying to tell you that ads as they are constituted now, are a good thing, because "that's how content is paid for." This is either disingenuous or bewildered. Content can be paid for without abusing the site visitors. Ads can be served without bringing in other network excursions. No one has to be tracked.

Evil practices we can do entirely without today, without "breaking the internet", include (but are not limited to:

o roll-overs: If I didn't click on it, I DIDN'T WANT IT. Ads, menus, "keywords" -- anything
o tracking -- not unless I say you can
o network traffic outside of the content provider -- just don't
o unnecessarily splitting content over many ad-bearing pages -- I hate you
o pop-up "continue to web site in x seconds" -- will not watch, let finish, or click. EVER.

The solution is right in front of all of us. All you have to do as a web site owner is grasp it. You'll instantly have happier visitors, visitors that stay longer, visitors that are MORE likely to click on your ads.

You'd also be VERY smart to ask users to select between text and graphic advertising. Best thing Google ever did was host text ads. Worst thing they ever did was lose focus on them. Learn from that. Let users select text ads if they prefer them. I would be *much* more likely to click on a polite text ad than the sanctimonious garbage the ad companies are inflicting on us these days.

It's simple

[guruevi]

I block all 3rd party content on any website and I don't use 3rd party content on my own websites. If you require libraries, ads etc. you should host them yourself, a client should not have to trust a 3rd party to provide 'clean and safe' content because they simply cannot be trusted and it reflects badly on your own site.

If CNN provides malware through their ad system, it reflects on CNN, not on the 3rd party ad provider and thus those provider have no incentive nor intention to provide safer content.