iOS 9 Ad Blocker Benchmarks
murphyapps.co
murphyapps.co
Feels like there are a few possibilities:
- Nothing: the impact of users who install these plugins is minor.
- They sue Apple. Feels like a short game.
- Try and game the system: multiple domains to serve trackers and ads, etc.
- They adjust their technology stack to serve fewer ads and reduce page bloat.
- They put up paywalls.
- They bet more heavily on things like Facebook or Apple's new News app.
Of the options, #1 and #4 feel like the most likely options long-term. People want free content, which requires _some_ sort of revenue stream. And they don't want to put their futures in the hands of Apple or Facebook.
This won't happen because there are already ad networks out there which are very lightweight and have strict rules (ex. Adsense).
No more than 3 ads per page, rules about where they can be, and how big they can be, and that they can't do things like interrupt the flow of the page, (so no ads in between paragraphs). No animations, no video, no misleading/attention grabbing ads, no pushing content below the fold, no moving ads, the list goes on and on and on.
Sadly most content creators don't use them because they don't pay as well as the scummy networks.
Plus people still block them all the same while assuming they are the scummy networks.
It's now a lose-lose situation to try and be a good ad network now. (Remember what happened when adblock tried to allow unobtrusive ads? The internet collectively tried to kill them over it!)
I see your number 3 as the one that will be most likely.
> Sadly most content creators don't use them because
> they don't pay as well as the scummy networks.
Adsense seems to have much better payout than just about anything.
Also, you can get bad, misleading, or animated ads on Adsense like that fake "Download" button you see on scummy sites. Just keep "Enable 3rd Partners" and respective checkboxes checked.
And those "download button" ads aren't through AdSense. There are other networks under Google like doubleclick that serve the "scummy-er" ads. (which IMO they should crack down on)
If you do see any ads that do things like fake download buttons in what they call "display ads" then they should be reported, as that specific example is used as a not-okay ad.
And if Apple could make web browsing 2x-3x as fast, battery life last 2x as long and enumerate benefits to privacy, security and user experience with no consequences why wouldn't they do it ? It makes their devices better in every regard than their competitors. And that's what they care about.
- Render ads into page content server-side.
1. Prerendered ads would still be detectable if you leave in your tracking code client side.
2. If you take out the tracking code, then it would have to be handled on the server side. Which leads to the question, whose servers are handling this? And how is the data aggregated?
3. Also, without tracking code client side, it would be far less beneficial to advertisers because it would be much harder to tell who you are when you visit and decide what ad to serve you. I'm sure there are ways around this, but it is far more difficult compared to what they do now.
4. Caching.
Of course these problems aren't impossible to get around, but prior to the iOS 9 stuff, there really was no benefit to even consider doing any of this.
Personally, I’d rather see more effective forms of paying directly and not compromise the integrity of the content, but then I’m the guy who still buys box sets of spinning discs to enjoy my favourite shows uninterrupted and legally instead of either watching the ad-ridden ones on TV or pirating them on-line, so I guess I’m probably in a minority these days.
Given that we’ve yet to solve the micropayments problem, and even if we did it’s not entirely clear how well it would work, I wonder whether the most promising avenue might be some sort of collective subscription scheme. Smaller (or not) sites could join a collective programme that includes a lot of different sites aimed at similar audiences, there would effectively be a paywall but paid through a single centralised subscription rather than every individual site so much of the time users wouldn’t actually see it, and then some sort of simple marker that indicates you’re a subscriber and gets you in would also let the scheme track which sites were getting the most views and adjust payments in some reasonable way proportionate to value.
Some of the most successful on-line business models of recent times, other than ad-based and direct payment, seem to have been the library-style services like Netflix and Spotify, so I could believe this sort of collective subscription scheme could work if anyone had enough resources to get it up to a useful number of publishers and subscribers to be credible quickly enough. It feels like a balance of convenience and commercial viability that might actually work to me.
A significant problem might be that the umbrella schemes wind up taking a huge chunk of the revenue for themselves instead of passing it on to the real content providers, since the whole model depends on having a small enough number of schemes to be manageable for customers and that implies a degree of consolidation. Then again, we have a similar problem with big ad networks and with other types of middleman site today, so I’m not sure it would necessarily be any worse and at least very successful sites could still go their own way if they were valuable enough to their users so there would always be some inherent competition for any umbrella scheme.
Apple isn't writing their own, or pre-installing one, or anything like that. (At least, nothing like that has been publicly discussed, and I'd be very surprised if it was something they did.)
In this case, I expect Google and the advertiser's interests to align.
Why should amartya916 care? If you'd have ads blocked, your visit would only use up bandwidth anyway, without a chance to generate revenue through ads. So without the "use chrome" wall for Safari users, s/he wouldn't generate ad views. With that wall, there's at least the chance of people switching to chrome.
Yes, thats an option. But with web publishing, which is mostly inbound traffic through search engines, that doesn't matter. That isn't exactly a niche where sustainable customer relationships are top priority.
* option 1: Safari user with ad blocker visits site. bandwidth costs: yes. ad revenue: no -> net negative
* option 2: Safari user gets chrome-walled. bandwidth costs: no. ad revenue: no, but slight chance of switch to chrome -> net neutral with slight chance of net positive
* option 3: Safari user goes to competition (= different google result). bandwidth costs: no. ad revenue: no -> net neutral.
Really though, I doubt that much will happen. I imagine that only reasonably tech savvy iOS users will install ad blockers and the overall impact will be minimal, just like its been for every other browser that supports ad blocking.
And whoever cries that is site/app doesn't make enough cash any longer, didn't have something valuable at the first place. No one will bat an eye.
Would you really want to block access to them ?
Your icon is cute, but the stats are unverifiable and therefore you need to change the title.
Unless you've paid to be on YC, in which case carry on.