Apple’s content blocking is chemo for the cancer of adtech

https://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2015/08/26/apples-content-blocking-is-chemo-for-the-cancer-of-adtech/

by cpeterso • 11 years ago

35 65 11 years ago

blogs.law.harvard.edu

iwwr2• 11 years ago

This isn't the end of tracking, just the platform owners angling in on the market and setting up toll booths for advertisers. It does have the advantage of potentially less tracking overall, but personal data is still valuable and Apple just wants a piece of the pie on something they perceive they own. Tracking will be allowed as long as it doesn't significantly impact the user's experience or over-burden the data usage.

egypturnash• 11 years ago

Sounds like it's entirely up to the author of the block app (and the user's choices in configuring that) to determine what's blocked. Think about how much tracking most desktop adblockers also block.

eridius6• 11 years ago

This is not true. Apple most emphatically does not want a slice of the pie that is personal data. They've made it clear time and time again that they do not want your personal data, they do not monetize it, they do not collect anything more than aggregate statistics necessary to improve their own products[1], and Tim Cook has made it very clear that Apple's executive leadership values privacy very highly.

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).

eropple2• 11 years ago

They've made it clear time and time again that they do not want your personal data

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.

reustle• 11 years ago

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Apple is (indirectly) going after any ad that they themselves don't power with iAd. Is that even considered "fair", in a legal sense? Seems pretty anti-competitive.

Zr402• 11 years ago

It's a different domain. Content blocking only applies to Safari. iAd ads only appear in third party apps if the developer chooses to use them. They could also use a different ads provider. That's not affected by content blocking because it's not a web page inside Safari.

gcb02• 11 years ago

we don't know their plans for the future. as long as it is a webview, they own it.

gcb02• 11 years ago

fair have never been a problem at apple.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/10/4510338/apple-found-guilty...

http://www.cnet.com/news/judge-rejects-324-5m-wage-fixing-se...

eridius6• 11 years ago

That's complete nonsense. They're providing content blocking in Safari. They're not blocking in-app ads, which is the area that iAd competes in, so they're not harming any iAd competitors.

cbeach• 11 years ago

Personally I don't care about tracking if it means advertisers show me adverts I might want to click on (and thus the ecosystem I use can be funded). But I do care about adverts that aren't targeted to my needs and wants. I'd block those if I could, and leave the targeted ads alone.

WalterGR2• 11 years ago

   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.

How is that measured?

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?

eridius6• 11 years ago

Given that ads on mobile typically block you from seeing the content until you've clicked through the ad, then I think it's safe to say that removing the ad lets you see the content faster.

WalterGR2• 11 years ago

   Given that ads on mobile typically block you from seeing
   the content until you've clicked through the ad

In my experience, ads on mobile that don't block you from seeing content are more common than those that do.

I wonder if anyone has any hard data on this.

threeseed2• 11 years ago

There is a benchmark of various web blockers and the testing methodology:

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.

tdicola• 11 years ago

Dan Kaminsky has a great presentation from the latest Defcon a few weeks ago about how ads and other junk on the web eat up a ton of CPU cycles and slow down page rendering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wx2TnaRSGs

hoodoof3• 11 years ago

I'm happy with advertising. It pays for all the free stuff. Apple wants to kill all the free content so you only have the choice of paying Apple to do anything.

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.

panabee• 11 years ago

Not to mention killing ads kills the primary revenue source for its primary competitor. (90% of Google's revenue in 2014 came from ads.) Though to be clear, Apple isn't trying to nuke all ads. It's just trying to steer people away from the web and toward apps.

pjmlp3• 11 years ago

I hope they succeed. Web is for interactive content not apps.

too many scars of web projects trying to replicate desktop experience with pixel perfect requirement across browsers.

</rant mode>

onion2k3• 11 years ago

I'm happy with advertising. It pays for all the free stuff.

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.

hoodoof3• 11 years ago

Yes it's an ecosystem I want to be healthy.

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.

rtpg2• 11 years ago

That's a pretty naive way of doing it. Without advertising, many (real as in "sells goods" sense) businesses would not find any real growth. Advertising is a business cost like any other. and websites with ads sell eyeballs.

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.

na854• 11 years ago

Companies built around an advertising model should detect and reject Apple browsers.

Companies built around an advertising model should die in ignominy.

mattlutze• 11 years ago

There's no reason not to use advertisements to fund your content-producing efforts.

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?

mc808• 11 years ago

I'm happy to view content supported by ads that are not animated, are not hosted or tracked by third parties, are not disguised as normal content, and which do not execute scripts. It's also easy enough to sneak that type of ad past an ad blocker. Win-win.

DanBC2• 11 years ago

I'm tolerant of ads[1] but I remember an Internet before ads; a WWW where most pages were not ad-driven, and it was amazing.

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

hoodoof3• 11 years ago

You may be recalling "the web we used to have" with nostalgia. The web we have is MUCH better and Google does it share of paying for it.

oska• 11 years ago

I'm happy with advertising.

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.

pjmlp3• 11 years ago

I am ok with adverting in small doses, not when 90% of the page are ads.

threeseed2• 11 years ago

Companies built around an advertising model should detect and reject Apple browsers.

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.

teaneedz• 11 years ago

I believe that the growing aversion is toward the pervasive tracking and UX destroying variety of ads. Not all ads have to be that. It's not just an iOS user mentality obviously since ad block usage is increasing across desktops too. The ad ecosystem is out of control and in need of an overhaul. iOS 9 will simply help many more see how much ad-tech has slowed down the browsing experience. Also, free stuff will always exist on the Internet.

soneil• 11 years ago

Advertising is useful, at least until we find a better way to pay for things we don't want to pay for.

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.

vacri• 11 years ago

Is this really the right reference to go for? Chemo is universally hated, makes you look like not yourself, makes you throw up and feel sick all the time, steals all your energy, and, importantly, often does not work.

na854• 11 years ago

While I agree with you, chemotherapy is the layperson's only term for most cancer treatment. And make no mistake, advertising is a cancer that needs to be judiciously dealt with.

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/

Animats• 11 years ago

Can you block Apples iAd, too?

This looks like what Apple did with payments on IOS - only Apple's payment system is allowed, and Apple takes a 30% cut.

liviu• 11 years ago

We are talking here about Safari content blocking. iAd ads are not displayed in Safari, they are for native applications and you can display ads from whatever publisher you want in your native app.

tomlock2• 11 years ago

My theory is this is Apple's attempt to push people working in adtech towards Apple's Google-Analytics analogues.

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.

hayksaakian• 11 years ago

Do Facebook and Apple really have an analytics platform anywhere as good as Google analytics? If one of them acquires kissmetrics or mixpanel of something I'd believe you but having used facebook's business interface first hand it's only good at analytics "on facebook" it tells you very little about your actual site even if you have their pixels on every page. With Google I can see my marketing funnel from on every platform.

tomlock2• 11 years ago

I totally agree, but having a bad platform hasn't stopped people trying to sell theirs to enterprise, afaik.

Asbostos• 11 years ago

Is this really different from what AdBlock already does on every platform? It looks like the key feature is that the adblocker app doesn't have to have access to your browsing data. But people will still have to install it, just like they already have to install existing adblockers.

Apple’s content blocking is chemo for the cancer of adtech

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