Safari 5’s ‘Reader’ Nudges Web Publishers to App Store
wired.com
wired.com
I don't see this too different from the "Popup Blocker" feature. Remember the days when popup window was the standard way to display ads. Now pretty much every browser comes with popup blocker.
It's just time to change how you build and place your advertisement. Don't be annoying, otherwise, there will be people rushing to get rid of the things people hate to please the users. There is no law against it.
Not even that, Reader is not an ad blocker it's a reformatter, it's a built-in Readability and nothing more. And you have to see the page before you can even trigger readability, so really it's not like it's disappearing your ads.
> I don't see this too different from the "Popup Blocker" feature. Remember the days when popup window was the standard way to display ads. Now pretty much every browser comes with popup blocker.
In fact, Reader is much less anti-ads than popup blocking ever was.
That said, S5 is still plagued by some of the problems I had with earlier versions - such as "completed 7 of 8 items" ... (I'm waiting), not logging in to my univ's network, etc. So Chrome it is, for now.
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/jggheggpdocamnea...
(It's basically a port of arc90's Readability to Chrome.) In a perfect world, it would do something similar to the Reader-esque lightbox styling, but it's proven to be pretty usable for me regardless.
Whilst it's true that my marketing skills (or lack thereof) are partially to blame for these reasonably pathetic results, it's also compelling empirical evidence that you are in the minority (less than 2%).
If it wasn't for the on site advertising, which barely covers hosting costs, I would have shut the site down years ago. It eats up way too much of my time as it is.
My guess is that the porn companies, which make you buy annoying subscriptions, make a lot more money that way than they would with some Google text ads. It's because they don't set the price at $0 and then ask for any amount of money. The set the price at $30 and ask for $30. Don't have $30? No soup for you.
I'm just saying that even if this was true (which, based on what you just said, is not the case) that you would be the minority by a long, long way.
Of course, much of this is marketing. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. An insightful article, overall.
This also adds another dimension to the browser wars. Microsoft, Google and Apple all have browsers, all have ad platforms. Any of them could make their browser block out annoying Flash(y) ads and replace them with JPGs, smaller format ads, nothing or their own ads.
The browser with the best browsing experience wins, not the browser who follows standards religiously. Chrome is an excellent example, they're adding very important features that are getting them market share because standards alone are not sufficient for promoting the web as a platform.
Reformatting websites is not a new idea, but a new money dimension could make things interesting.