Jeremy Horwitz, in an insightful op-ed piece for 9to5mac:
Advertising is an easy target: it’s an eyesore, slows down web pages, and — in the wrong hands — compromises your privacy. But whether you accept it or hate it, advertising is also the reason you don’t have to pay for your news. As Ben Lovejoy noted last month, “without ad revenue, 9to5Mac wouldn’t exist; it’s that simple.” And he’s right: surveys suggest that the vast majority of people do not want to pay for the news they consume, and the few who do can’t pay enough to keep their favorite publications afloat for the long term. Ads keep publications alive.
Thanks to the introduction of ad-blocking technology in iOS 9, some people think Apple wants to help users get rid of ads. But that’s not Apple’s goal. Yesterday’s debut of Apple News shows that it’s actually angling to replace the ads you know, build upon them, and take a cut of their revenue…
Hard to argue this logic. Advertising is the necessary evil that keeps the news afloat. As they’ve done time and time again, Apple is building a revenue bottleneck, a path that funnels ad money into Apple, while doing their best to eliminate paths that allow ad money to flow elsewhere.
This type of business model organization is something that Apple does very well. They take something chaotic (like the music business) and build a simpler model with very well defined rules. And as part of the reorganization, they get a steady slice of the pie.
So what is different about these ads and why wouldn’t people want to block them?
Apples news ads are “in app” ads, not in Safari. Apples content blockers only work on web pages loaded in Safari – not on content within native Apps; i.e. Apple news, Facebook, etc…
But that’s true of any ad blocker. The problem with moving everything to News or Facebook etc is that it will eventually land us in the same conundrum as the app store has. Major apps will thrive, minor ones will, with rare exceptions, die.
One of the things the open web does is allow people to publish at very little expense; the expense is all in the content creation (paying the writers and editors) and so you can, potentially, build an audience. I wonder if places like The Awl, The Millions, etc would ever take off in a curated, walled content garden.
I’m assuming a lack of tracking, for one. I’m much less inclined to block a site’s ads if I know they don’t track me.
I think it will be great if I can put some websites on exception list on the blocker. This way site I like would still make some money.
Most ad blockers do this.