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ASUS To Include AdBlock Plus On All Phones and Tablets In 2016 (betanews.com)
JoeyRox writes: Starting in 2016 Asus will ship all phones and tablets with AdBlock Plus integrated into their mobile browser. The ad-blocking software will not only be pre-installed but enabled by default as well. The move to include ad-blocking software on mobile devices is significant because unlike desktop users the percentage of mobile users presently employing ad-blocking software is very low at approximately 2%.
The sorts of politically incorrect software that Asian electronics companies can ship is sometimes funny. I'm sure there are a few smaller vendors that even ship a Torrent app with the explanation being up front "the customer wants to download pirated movies". I love it.
Baking in an adblocker will certainly raise eyebrows in Google and other big advertising syndicates.
This is an interesting move.
Will others follow suit and a crisis in online advertising ensue?
Or will ABP leverage this to extract gobs of cash from the ad industry to allow a lot of ads through, rendering it relatively useless?
I shall remain behind my DNS-based ad blocking here at home and watch with interest.
On a side note, some YouTube ads are sneaking through on a mobile device. Anyone know what domain(s) they're being served from? It's a fairly recent phenomenon; something's changed on their end it seems.
It's starting to feel a bit like the end of an era for the advertising-based business model for the web. Almost everybody I know now uses an adblocker on their desktop/laptop PC. My employer recently switched on adblocking-by-default on our office PCs, due to concerns over the number of malware-spreading adverts. Meanwhile, adverts while mobile browsing have become so disruptive (it's virtually impossible now to browse certain websites on an iPhone) that I'm strongly considering adblocking on my phone as well.
The web-advertising industry is on the verge of suicide. Few people had a problem with the static banner ads and most tolerated the animated .gifs, but the video-ads were a further intrusion and, for many people (self included), the auto-playing video-ads were the tipping point. The increasing prevalence of ads as a means of pushing malware and the failure of the advertising networks to screen them out seems to have been the tipping point for a lot of Government and corporate networks as well.
So the question is, what comes next and what does it mean? The strangulation of advertising income is going to fundamentally change the way a lot of sites operate. The pace at which newspapers and magazines are paywalling formerly free content is accelerating. In other cases, the content is free but subscription plans are available for an enhanced service, or even required if users want to leave comments or participate in forums. Are we moving towards a world in which only sites with a product to sell and small-scale operations will be free to browse?
If so, there might be upsides as well as downsides. One product of the advertising model has been the clickbait-culture. That's not just about "10 shocking things you won't believe" and "this one neat trick" headlines, it's also about deliberately provocative content. Stories which get people riled up are great business, if your business model is based on page-views and ad-views. Give people an interesting article that they enjoy reading and they will view the page once then move on. Give them something that makes them angry and they will leave an angry comment, then refresh the page 30 times over the course of the day to argue with other people leaving angry comments. Just look at the stories on Slashdot which get the highest number of comments...
Slashdot is a long way from the worst offender (even though, in the DICE-era, it undoubtedly is an offender). The advertising web model has turned the angry fringe voices, whether the ultra-conservative demagogues of the right, or the "ban everything I don't like" Angry Campus Narcissists of the left into a profitable business model and in doing so has arguably coarsened public debate and poisoned the wider political sphere.
So maybe the death of the advertising model and the move to a subscription-based web might be a good thing.
But your phone has to be rooted to use it. Adaway can be downloaded from D-froid [ http://f-droid.org/ ]. Each known ad web url is redirected to 127.0.0.1, really rocks :)
It's made by an advertising company. That's a conflict of interest right there.
Wrong attitude. The use of an ad blocker which defines "acceptable" ads sends a clear message on what we can tolerate, and quite frankly I'm quite happy to tolerate ads that are not obtrusive, animated, or include any multimedia other than text or even a very small static picture.
What I don't want is a world where I have to make a micro payment to every bloody page I visit.
Gonna have to post AC here...
It definitely, as a solid fact, does do that. I work in ads. We recently made sure all our ads were "acceptable" (and they previously hadn't been) per the adblockplus guidelines, in the hopes of getting onto their optional whitelist.
This came down from above; it wasn't my decision. I see it as pointless, because I personally use adblockplus too, and I sure as fuck don't enable the "acceptable" whitelist. I infer, then, that nearly everyone else does that too. But it doesn't matter; the strategists above said let's try to "work with it" and who knows, maybe some people do enable the whitelist.
And strategic wisdom aside, the consequences are that our ads are now less annoying for the people who don't block them. "Less annoying enough?" you might ask and that's a whole other debate. But the effect is exactly as you describe: it got us to limit our excesses. IMHO we did it for the wrong reasons, but it happened.
And we're not even on the whitelist yet. I think very few advertisers ever will be, but many of us want to be on it, or want to keep that option open if our numbers suddenly start falling (they actually haven't; even still, as of late 2015 I am convinced that a supermajority still aren't blocking).
Give adblockplus some credit, everyone: with this "sellout" move of the "acceptable ads" whitelist, they really did do the whole world some good.