Apple’s content blocking is chemo for the cancer of adtech
blogs.law.harvard.edu
blogs.law.harvard.edu
It is getting a bit ridiculous how bluntly Google (the incumbent), Apple (whoa we track mobiles really well) and Facebook (wahey, we track real people, come over here) are all trying to push adtech people onto their platforms. They are now truly going for the Enterprise market, and are looking to lock them in.
This looks like what Apple did with payments on IOS - only Apple's payment system is allowed, and Apple takes a 30% cut.
But this particular meme is derived from the bad old days of /b/ when most threads were spammed with stuff like
>XYZ IS THE CANCER KILLING /b/
>XYZ IS THE CANCER KILLING /b/
>XYZ IS THE CANCER KILLING /b/
>XYZ IS THE CANCER KILLING /b/
>XYZ IS THE CANCER KILLING /b/
>XYZ IS THE CANCER KILLING /b/
>XYZ IS THE CANCER KILLING /b/
Companies built around an advertising model should detect and reject Apple browsers.
Individuals who value getting free stuff on the web should switch to non Apple browsers to show support for advertising.
<rant mode>
too many scars of web projects trying to replicate desktop experience with pixel perfect requirement across browsers.
</rant mode>
But not magically with free money that just appears when a company decides to buy an advert. Adverts are paid for by businesses that consequently charge a little more for their goods and services, a cost passed directly to you and me. We don't get free services, we get services that we pay for indirectly through other things. Free is a myth.
Many, many software engineers have jobs and many startups exist because there is an advertising ecosystem.
The advertising ecosystem is an inherent part of the capitalist economy. In whose interest is it to kill that?
Apple should stop advertising if it hates advertising so much.
I don't think that's true. Advertising (or rather, marketing) is a way to circumvent word of mouth - instead of making something and telling the small number of people in your network, who tell other people and so on, an advert is essentially paying someone to go and tell lots of people all at once regardless of who they are and whether they're interested.
It feels necessary because it's how things are done at the moment. That's not the same as actually being necessary.
Mind you, I don't have an alternative. If I did I'd probably be writing an application to YC right now.
I doubt that; it distorts competition by making false / aggrandizing claims about products and their prices and capitalist markets would work much better with transparency instead of the smokescreens of advertising (i.e. more comparison shopping).
> In whose interest is it to kill that?
Consumers and small businesses would profit greatly if advertising played a smaller role (big businesses spend a lot of money in advertising to sell inferior products, small companies find it difficult to compete even with better or cheaper offers).
Also, page load times and traffic plans, obviously.
There is nothing particularly healthy about an advertising ecosystem. It skews the incentives of content creators towards dishonesty.
>The advertising ecosystem is an inherent part of the capitalist economy. In whose interest is it to kill that?
Anybody who believes that market power should be determined by the quality of your products rather than your advertising budget?
Sao Paolo banned advertising. As far as I'm aware they are still a capitalist economy.
Arguing that all advertising is misleading and evil is just as silly as saying that all advertising is truthful and trustworthy.
Honest salespeople know that selling a product to someone is a win-win situation. And honest ads can help people find things they are genuinely looking for, and solve a problem they are having.
Take Google for instance - it started out with good intentions and it has consistently blurred the distinction between its ads and content ever since. Why? Because that's how you get more ad dollars, of course. If being misleading didn't mean profits, Google wouldn't do it.
If you want to find the most egregious behavior in the advertising industry don't look at the small fry. Follow the trail of profit.
>And honest ads can help people find things they are genuinely looking for
They can, but that's a happy accident and a byproduct. The advertising industry is not geared to help connect people to things they want. It is geared towards invoking desires for things people didn't otherwise want and putting your name ahead of competitors in people's heads.
Why is it you don't believe THAT's the happy accident and byproduct, while diffusing information is the main mechanism?
If you'd ever tried to convince someone to buy something they don't want, you'd have a good idea about how likely that scenario is.
Have you ever bought something you didn't want?
What exactly did you think the purpose of high production values advertising that tries to convey a lifestyle or invoke feelings of inadequacy? You think they'd do all that to 'diffuse information'?
They're trying to hack your amygdala, not passing on a message.
And yea, I've bought a McDonalds hamburger while drunk before that I felt disgusted by after.
Things cost more because of advertising or marketing in general only in the sense that said things would not exist without them.
That's like saying conferences actually cost more because of sponsors.
I think you're conflating advertising with marketing. Marketing is what grows a company, and advertising is a part of marketing (how big or small a part depends on the business). We could have no advertising and still have companies informing people about their products.
Companies built around an advertising model should die in ignominy.
Newspapers, magazines, television, radio, podcasts, internet forums... pretty much any of this content is paid for by advertising.
Would you rather everyone have to pay for SeriusXM, basic cable, etc?
That is what we already do in Europe anyway. Most countries have TV and Radio tax.
Additionally in countries like my own, if you don't subscribe to cable, there are only 4 lousy channels available, with deplorable content.
Most of what's on TV is complete shit, and I'm happy to pay for netflix. The only thing I miss are hockey games, but I can always go to one live, or go to a bar.
A lot of content now is not ad supported but ad driven - they meed the clicks to get views for ads. But ad views pay so little they need people to click the ads. So ads become manipulative and scummy ("HELLO!" Punch the monkey, mosquito, you won't believe, etc) and also content becomes dumb to drag in people who can't tell the difference between links to other content and ads.
I miss the WWW we used to have.
[1] although i strongly feel that I should be allowed to opt out of gambling and alcohol ads - not being able to do so pushes me towards ad blockers
is it shinier? yes, it is much shinier.
Is everything better? No. Privacy's worse, signal to noise is worse (that's a natural consequence of availability, anyway). Are a lot of things better? Yep. Niche sites can get traffic in a way they never could before. That's the natural consequence of taking humans out of the loop- instead of having to interest Jerry or David, now your only requirement for indexing is to interest anyone who is also interesting.
Let's keep working to make things better, but let's also not forget the improvements that have already been made.
3) Join a web-ring
4) Add a link in Usenet signatures
5) Ask to be included in the WWW Links section of your interest group's magazine
Or
6) Not worry about discoverability at all because the Web wasn't about growth and profit
My preference as a publisher and reader was for web-rings, they exemplified the attitude of sharing and mutual assistance on the early Web that has been largely lost nowadays.
That's how pagerank worked. Ads destroyed that.
In particular, one way to make your site discoverable was to write to bloggers that might be interested in it.
Good for you. I'm not. And I reserve the right to block anything appearing on my computer through my paid-for internet service. I also read and view a lot of content that is offered for free and that material has 1) no need for an advertising support model and 2) is often better than that supported by such models.
Not sure why this gets repeated. iOS users whether you like it or not are a significant percentage of users (especially on mobile). They skew higher socio economically and are far more likely to spend money for content. There is a reason why iOS is the primary platform for development.
Companies should instead look at WHY people would want to block ads. They are often poorly implemented on mobile e.g. cover content or are unable to be dismissed. They don't take into account people are generally skimming through content. And they excessively drain the battery.
Unfortunately, history has proven we also need ways to steer their behaviour. I don't particularly miss having metric tonnes of dead trees shoved through my front door. Or having my phone ring all evening. I don't think pop-up blockers have destroyed the internet as we know it. And I don't feel bad for any business model that's suffered from improvements in spam filtering.
While it's obvious the money needed to run out favourite services needs to come from somewhere, it's also obvious that we need to be able to enforce some limits to the never-ending war to make your advert more visible than the other guy's.
How likely is it that these apps will be built? 100%. One of those is
Crystal, by Dean Murphy. His pitches: ... Pages render more than 3.9x
faster on average.
Do ads delay the rendering of the important, non-ad content by nearly 4x? Or does that content render before ads, and the ads take a long time to render?
Put another way: am I going to see the content I care about 3.9x faster?
Given that ads on mobile typically block you from seeing
the content until you've clicked through the ad
I wonder if anyone has any hard data on this.
https://www.raymond.cc/blog/10-ad-blocking-extensions-tested...
It's not just about rendering time. There is implications for battery life which on phones is obviously pretty important.
http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/10/4510338/apple-found-guilty...
http://www.cnet.com/news/judge-rejects-324-5m-wage-fixing-se...
Unlike a lot of other companies (cough Google cough), Apple makes money by selling hardware and software. They do not make it by monetizing your data. And they view this as a competitive advantage.
[1] For example, you can bet they collect aggregate statistics on Spotlight searches that search the web, but they get rid of any personally-identifying information, so they can't tell anything about any given user (i.e. no tracking).
Until they do. Which may or may not happen, but remains an extant problem regardless. Relying on the beneficence of a corporate entity is never a wise decision.
The argument for why other companies (like Google) do want your personal data is the exact same one for why Apple doesn't. Because that's how they make money. You might as well claim that Google may one day decide to just throw out all the personal data they have on everyone and become a charitable organization that gives away its software out of the goodness of its heart.
There is literally no reason to think Apple will change course about this, besides complete ignorance about how Apple works and what the core values that Apple believes in are.
You're being incredibly naive. History has shown us again and again that all companies will eventually screw their users over to make a quick buck. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but sooner or later some MBA grad will get shuffled in to a C-level position and decide that they can harness that good ol' Big Data for profit.
I think you place too much emphasis on companies having moral values. Companies don't have values other than profits. The people in charge may have them, but they are relentlessly driven to produce value for the shareholders, which is not necessarily an evil thing. It's not the purview of a company to have moral values.
Apple have made themselves by becoming a platform rather than being strictly a hardware company. Their hardware can be regarded as tools or tokens necessary to access Apple's services, rather than products in and of themselves.
> We do things because they are right and just and that is who we are. That’s who we are as a company. I don’t…when I think about human rights, I don’t think about an ROI. When I think about making our products accessible for the people that can’t see or to help a kid with autism, I don’t think about a bloody ROI, and by the same token, I don’t think about helping our environment from an ROI point of view.
And then he told them to sell their shares:
> If you only want me to make things, make decisions that have a clear ROI, then you should get out of the stock.
[1] http://mashable.com/2014/02/28/apple-ceo-tim-cook-climate-ch...
I have never seen a reason to believe such a thing actually exists, and herein lies the disjoint between your worldview and mine.