> What will it take for this advertising bubble to pop?
Browsers shipping with uBlock Origin included.
Browsers shipping with uBlock Origin included.
Don’t delude yourself
They already essentially killed off "ad supported apps" with App Tracking Transparency, and Apple doesn't earn anything from ads anyway (as opposed to paid apps where they take a cut).
And hey, if Apple will crack down on Facebook's espionage over privacy concerns, who says they won't do the same to these advertisers and their abusive surveillance capitalism? Maybe they'll realize that advertising is pure noise nobody cares about and block all ads in order to improve usability. Maybe one day they'll get pissed they aren't getting their fair 30% share of advertiser revenue and block them out of spite. Maybe they'll wake up one day and simply decide to kill the ads industry. Now that's a delusion worth having.
Plus, I would say they profit more when the web experience on their devices is inferior to apps, which means annoying ads and popups help drive people to use apps, which Apple profits from... (and some companies, like Reddit, actively participate in annoying their own users to get the app).
By allowing them to abuse their users?
> if sites can't make money, there is no web to browse
There are other ways to make money other than advertising. If they insist on ads, they should disappear.
Besides, not everyone creates a website for profit. Sometimes people just have something interesting to say. The web used to have a lot of those before these commercial interests started infesting it.
Sometimes I feel like ad block users get overzealous and try to convince themselves and others that every ad out there is trying to inject malware into your machine. Very few ads do this and the average person who doesn't use AdBlock won't ever have that happen to them. Ads solve an economic distribution problem by cutting the transaction of spreading and consuming information in half. It makes the web accessible.