Apple's "evil/genius" plan to punk the web and gild the iPad
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
a. paying for hardware
b. paying for apps
c. paying for airtime
... in order to see ads.
(Disclosure: I haven't had cable in about ten years.)
Why should a product just have one revenue model? If it weren't for advertising, these products would have to charge more to generate the same revenue.
Also, do you think a developer would make more money with a free, iAd version over a paid app? If so, developers would obviously be more enticed to offer a free, iAd version, which would also make Apple more money (40% of iAd revenue versus 30% for paid apps).
The alternative? Pay for your software, too. There's no reason it should be free.
The main reason Google ads worked so well for so long is because they are topical and their format was new. Word on the vine is that the click-through rates for most text ads is falling...
History repeats.
The prevailing popular opinion? Doesn't matter. Everybody's a poker player. A BAD poker player. They say they won't pay, but they will. I'm sure if you told people they could have free food, they would turn around and tell the next restaurant that they wouldn't pay. But when they got hungry outside of the free food hours, or they really felt like indian tonight instead of food caplets, they would.
I think geeks, having a slightly better than average ability to get software for free, BELIEVE their own poker-playing, but of course, they will also pay. The proof is there.
In one office, one group of people working on Safari decided Readability was a good idea worthy of reimplementation. In another office, possibly another building, another group of people decided iAd would be a good idea. Any higher ups, including Steve, probably agreed with both assessments without thinking to put the two together, because they have far more important work to do than designing absurd conspiracies to "punk the web and gild the iPad".
Personally, I'm tickled by this silly and completely implausible variant of the "corporation as federation" idea: That the the executive team is focused on the iOS platform to such an extent that the desktop Safari team implemented Reader -- "annoying ads" marketing and all -- simply to see if they could get away with it.
What I am saying is that it's highly implausible that the executive team deliberately set out to advantage iAds by reimplementing Readability in the Mac version of Safari. (If Mobile Safari had Reader--where it would be even more useful--then some suspicion could be warranted.)
1) Readability got popular. It's a good idea so they baked it into the browser.
2) There is plenty of money in ads. Apple decided they wanted some of this money instead of funneling it to a direct competitor.
I prefer the conspiracy idea myself.
Also, Instapaper. Marco Arment (IP developer) once wrote that some people use IP not for articles they want to read later but for articles they want to read right now, just because it's so good at making articles readable.
This is why I look to authors like John Siracusa for quality articles on Ars Technica. This article however, is just a giant assumption that is likely to not be true.
Someone will write a javascript workaround that stops "reader mode" from triggering. If it's just a simple heuristic, it should be easy to defeat.
Why bother with artificial intelligence when the real thing is so inexpensive?
Indeed, you might not even have to pay. Just build a system to report bugs. People may happily self-report when their adblocker fails to function on pages where they want it to function.
I suppose there might be tricks, like chopping your page up into misarranged divs and then unshuffling them with CSS and/or JS, that make it really hard to scrape the content for Articles, even if you know that the page should be an article. That class of hacks will cost you in accessibility, though, and they can't be great for SEO.
In fact, if you really want to go all out, you could just serve the entire website as a rendered image to iPad users.
The possibilities are endless. I think the reason folks don't it now is that add blockers are not ubiquitous.
The only way web filtering works is if the display mechanism and the meaning of page displayed roughly correspond. If someone decides to start massively filtering the web in a way that doesn't serve the original site owner, the site owner can certainly start serving content that displays correctly but is hard to filter.
And Safari extensions loads automatically, so the user don't even have to hit the "reader" button.
Of course, that assumes a more intelligent metric for ad value than just the raw number of page views. Which means that this whole thing could end up benefiting Google. Who has the analytics data to help put a value on ads that is more intelligent than just "cost per thousand downloads of the ad, even if those downloads are on page seven of a ten-'page' article"? I know who!
Still, they seem intent on pushing the limits.
Everyone’s screaming about this, it’s completely blown out of proportion and crazy conspiracy theories are formulated. That’s different to how the press reacts to Microsoft or Google – exactly, how?
I always thought that Microsoft could have killed Google's non-search business and other free "cloud"-based competitors by shipping an ad blocker in IE. It would have ruined Microsoft's own free online service business, but they could have thrived on software license revenue alone. But, I think the DoJ and the EU would never allow it.
Ads on websites vs. ads in apps, iOS vs. Windows, Safari vs. Internet Explorer, Mobile Safari vs. Desktop Safari. All those kinds of details regulatory bodies tend to care about.
To give you just one example, Safari (the non-mobile variant, the one with the Reader feature) has at the moment a market share of around five percent, Internet Explorer has twelve times that.
Details like that matter in antitrust cases. Just because something looks superficially similar doesn’t mean it’s actually the same.
Reader is not an adblocker anymore than Readability or Instapaper are.
You guys are completely insane and blowing this out of proportion. Reader is a manually triggered page reformatter, essentially Readability built in, you have to already be on the page and you have to have seen the ads before Reader is even available.
The ars article is one of the few that got me to headdesk in years, it's unbelievably stupid.
Why doesn't Firefox already do this out of the box? It's not as if adblocking is a particularly new concept. This is ten-year-old technology. It's not as if adblocking isn't known to be something people want: Geeks use it all the time.
Personally I could give a crap. ;)
Apple is attacking Google on two fronts - the Web, a move to hit Google in the money belt via Reader and it's ad-blocking features; secondly, copying Google's advertising monetization methods to reap potentially Google like (aka huge) profits via iAd, and again limit/control Google/other advertising platforms's on their iOS's.
I got to hand it to Apple, it's a pretty good strategy. I suspect they won't suffer much backlash from this hypocrisy beyond the tech crowd though.
I am Google partisan in the war simply because Google's model seems to imply an open world whereas Apple's model seems to imply a closed world.
Chrome and Firefox have a plugin architecture and ad block.
Jailbreak you iPad and block iAds in /etc/hosts
Enjoy modern life and the Internet and gadgets.
(On a sidenote I'm still using Firefox over Chrome as Firefox is still the superior adblock platform. ;)
What difference? Safari 5 has a plugin architecture and doesn't have ad block built-in as shipped.
They just built Readability in the browser (literally, there are acknowledgements to Readability in Saf 5)
I had an iPhone which broke after 15 months, and have ordered an Android phone and couldn't be happier about it. I really don't feel like I'm missing out on anything.
I won't be surprised that if the Safari reader mode becomes popular, the big content provider and news sites start blocking Safari.
I had meant websites can start blocking Safari as a browser and not just the Safari reader-mode. Since Safari is effectively changing the way a content provider wants to display their websites and directly impact how they make money, especially important for news sites, both big and small, no one should be surprised if they revert to that.
If I was CNN, NYTimes, etc., I would do that.