Most web users tolerate ads; many web users hate advertising with the fiery passion of a thousand suns. There are many good reasons that users dislike ads (they’re bad for performance, security, and privacy) as well as less universal, more arguable grievances (e.g. annoyance factor, disagreement about the value exchange for ad-funded services, etc).
Apple, a company that makes ~80%ish of their revenue from iOS-based products, recently announced that iOS 9 will ship with a compelling ad-filtering API for the Safari browser.
A brilliant move by Apple to force news providers (the rich ones, at least) to move to creating applications or join its Flipboard clone.
Apple’s Flipboard clone uses Apple’s own iAds, of course, which cannot be blocked at all.
Quote: “Apple’s Flipboard clone uses Apple’s own iAds, of course, which cannot be blocked at all.”
This is incorrect. Publishers can you use any ads when they publish content through the iOS9 News-app.
Quote from the Apple rules: “Keep 100% of the revenue from the ads you sell in your articles or channel, or 70% when iAd sells ads for you. You can also earn revenue from ads sold by iAd that appear in Apple-curated topic feeds, such as Fashion or Technology.”
Link: https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documentation/Gen…
I didn’t say other ads cannot be used, did I? I just said “it uses iAds”, which it does.
And none of them can be blocked – iAds OR not.
Edited 2015-06-11 09:08 UTC
Do people actually use these flipboard-like things? Last time I was looking up something on some Android forums, one of the most frequent questions I saw was people asking how to shut flipboard off. Seems rather useless to me I must say.
Not sure. I do like the yahoo news digest app. That makes sense to me. I don’t have to flip ten pages to get the headlines I care about.
People who hate ads are generally the tech savvy ones, who jailbreak anyway, in which case iAds are easily blocked by renaming AdSheet.app to AdSheet.bak. A popular trick that still works for the ones who doesn’t bother a little bit of effort (like, 4 minutes in total for an ad free environment)
Where do you get the idea that people who hate ads are generally tech savvy? That’s 100% ridiculous. I can’t begin to count the number of people I’ve heard complaining about ads who are certainly not tech savvy. People in general hate advertising. It has nothing to do with the “relevance” of the ads either. It has to do with money and that people feel like everything is overpriced these days. People feel ripped off whether their buying food, gas, clothing, insurance, etc etc etc. Advertising is everywhere, trying to squeeze more money out of your wallet. That’s just legit ads too, but let’s not forget all the scammers, spam emails, and unsolicited robo-phone calls. It’s not hard to understand why people despise ads. What is hard to understand is why you would think it mostly applies only to those who are tech savvy.
Edited 2015-06-11 16:58 UTC
True up to a point but I was kinda surprised only about 10% use some form of ad-blocking. When I’ve used others computers I’ve been gob smacked how insidious they’ve become and just can’t understand how people bare it. Suppose, that means I’m benefiting from others pain but the interweb can f’off if I had to deal with the horror.
Anytime I hear someone complaining about ads I always ask why they don’t use an ad-blocker to block them. The response I get is the same almost every time, “I didn’t know you could”. The next most common response is people not wanting to `mess something up` or get a virus (remember, people are constantly warned about installing things). Considering typical average non-savvy users make up the majority, it’s easy to see why that number would be low. They’re basically either unaware or don’t trust that it’s safe.
Sure they can be blocked. Don’t use news.
I am not really pro or anti ads – I am in th media industry and we make most of our money from video advertising – but google ads do sort of creep me out. I mean as I write a post on osnews I see an ad for a site I visited recently.
I think what appeals to me about iAd’s (as a user) is that their non obtrusive and tracking is limited.
You can turn off interest-based ads for Google’s ads, though. Google actually offs a bit of configurability.
http://www.google.com/settings/ads
Actually, this is a common misconception. You can opt out of Google showing you interest based ads on a specific browser ( there is basically cookie that is set on your browser which switches to random ads ). However, you CANNOT opt out of Google tracking you.
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It’s not just you.
This article goes on to explain, with deep science, why targeted advertising is one of those “doomed in the long term if you do, doomed in the short term if you don’t” deals.
http://zgp.org/targeted-advertising-considered-harmful/
TL;DR: Advertising is a signal like a mating display. It’s supposed to be so hard for the advertisers that only the genuine article can survive carrying the burden. That’s why print ads are still worth much more than online ads. It’s clear to readers that they’re pushed out, en masse, with limited targeting capability.
That’s also why we’re seeing much more interest in ad blocking now than back in the days when everyone was on dial-up. Targeted advertising creeps people out and, on a deep instinctive level, tells them that the ads have ceased to serve their purpose.
It also hurts sites which sell ads because the ad network can identify the user on a high-value site, and then sell ads to them on a low-value site.
The author proposes that, to save web ads from going the way of e-mail cold-calling (ie. spam), websites should aim to detect users who neuter tracking mechanisms and reward them for helping to keep the site’s advertiser appeal from being leeched away. (ie. paginated sites could offer “single page view” for free to un-targetable users)
Edited 2015-06-13 06:07 UTC
When I read ‘it uses iAds’ part in the post, I thought/understood as that none other than iAd can be used on the system. Therefore I think the original commenter has a point there.
Actually this analysis isn’t correct. The ads that publishers sell themselves are still iAd’s ( in form and function ) their simply publisher controlled.
Apple is saying here ‘you can make an iAd for your content, display it, and keep 100% of the revenue you earn’. It’s really a brilliant ‘anti-Google’ strategy, and the safari ad blocking is just the icing on the cake.
K
Looks to me like platform builders are trying to prevent others from advertising on their platform, the ask-toolbar is being blocked by Microsoft now:
http://www.microsoft.com/security/portal/threat/encyclopedia/entry….
Except Microsoft listing ask.com toolbar as bad software has nothing to do with blocking 3rd party ads and everything to do with calling a spade a “spade”. The ask.com toolbar is what’s called a “PUP”, a Potentially Unwanted Program, or variously some call it scumware or malware depending on your point of view. That is, it’s installed by default with other programs with or without the user’s knowledge. It’s known to cause performance problems and snoop on browsing habits, not just search terms.
Actually, turns out it was mostly a ‘false’ alarm.
Microsoft changed their rules.
Microsoft doesn’t consider the latest versions of Ask Toolbar malware, just the old version. Supposedly, only a less than 1% of the installed based are/were ‘using’ the old version.
http://www.microsoft.com/security/portal/threat/encyclopedia/entry….
http://news.yahoo.com/microsoft-confirms-ask-toolbar-not-215800633….
What annoys me in web ads is the sheer amount of scam ads present.
And I am not talking about the ad services torrent sites use. I am talking about goddamn Google ads. There is this ad which pretends to be a Facebook notification. I fat fingered it on the smartphone and landed on a “your phone has malware!!11!!” page.
After that, I received a Google ad for facebook messenger. Does Google really expect me to trust it’s the real thing? No clicks from me.
This. These advertising providers will take money from anyone without ever attempting to verify the content of the adverts. This is the main reason I block all ads. I don’t feel like sorting through what I can and can’t trust, so to hell with all of them. If I want something, I generally search for it under my own power anyway. Oddly enough, most of the “ads” I actually am interested in come from Twitter, and they aren’t even ads in the traditional sense, but product reviews that people share. Those catch my interest far more than some marketing ad which more often than not turns out to be a false link anyway.
Is OSnews going to be on Apple News? The thing that’s REALLY a pain about osnews today is the lack of mobile site and ( at least for those of us using an iPhone daily ) Apple News would solve that + you would still make money ( twice, since I’d have to go to the site to post a comment anyway ).
K
It also sucks on Android and WP.
In all of my devices I cannot comment as I always get some sort of submission error/invalid user.
Even if it did work, I cannot chose to whom I am replying to.
?
Our site works perfectly on mobile browsers, both old and new – I use it all the time. We haven’t had a complaint about browsing on our site on mobile browsers since… Well, since ever, really. I’m really curious what’s going on.
That being said, wait a month, and your problems will be gone anyway
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Edited 2015-06-11 12:42 UTC
Elaborate!
It will be a surprise gift!
If you choose the “desktop version” from the mobile site, it will set a cookie that lasts a month. And during that month, you will see the desktop site.
But the mobile site of osnews has so terrible commenting system, you will end up clicking “desktop version” during any month anyway.
For example, if you want to reply to someone from the mobile site, you can’t, you have to create a new thread, and it also puts some useless info about your device underneath the post (as if anyone, include me the poster, cares).
A bit different, but one thing I find very annoying is when I use search engines to find old osnews articles. Instead of getting the normal articles, I get the mobile site (which is terrible on a desktop).
It wasn’t until I accidentally left a user agent switcher on that I noticed that osnews uses useragent sniffing to deliver different pages to the browser. Search engines are redirected to mobile pages, consequently it’s the mobile pages that get indexed. For those who wondered why DDG always returns the mobile pages, this is why.
I have to wonder if this was intentional or accidental, but I’d personally prefer the desktop urls to be indexed.
Edited 2015-06-11 13:54 UTC
when I’m using Google to search osnews.com, I get desktop site links…
It’s because osnews gives the desktop links to google bot, but if you try DDG/bing/yahoo/etc, you get the mobile site. I really don’t know why osnews is configured this way though. Who knows, perhaps the osnews staff only use google?
Basically there is just a comment box at the bottom, not a reply link under each comment.
Apparently I have to type the right subject so that the reply lands under the person I should be replying to.
However I could never validate that assumption, because the same login that works on any desktop browser, fails as being invalid.
This was true like one year ago, never bothered trying again.
You are using mobile.osnews.com, not the regular site. The mobile.osnews.com site is for old, pre-modern mobile browsers, such as PalmOS and Windows Mobile. The regular OSNews site works just fine on modern mobile browsers.
This comment was posted through it
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It ‘works’ but it hardly mobile friendly.
Well, then maybe it requires a clear message which one to use?
While this is mostly true, I do find it annoying that each comment is so wide that I have to constantly scroll back and forth horizontally to read each comment (even when I use the phone in landscape mode). It would also be nice if the comment headers didn’t take up quite as much vertical space. Just a couple of things to think about the next time you modify the layout.
Couldn’t agree more. I’ve found that the “Text Wrap” option in Opera for Android is really helpful for viewing the desktop version of the site.
That’s interesting to know, regarding the mobile site. But the main site is not at all responsive for mobile browsers.
For the record, I occasionally have that error too. Sometimes. With OSNews, I kind of get that there isn’t a ton of coders behind the scenes, so I just accept the quirks. It works most of the time.
I don’t use your mobile site because it doesn’t have threaded comments. I use the desktop version on Firefox on Android and it’s really painful. I barely visit the site anymore.
Not by my hand – I dislike these silly vendor-controlled aggreggators; just use RSS – but our site’s owner my put it up there, I don’t know. On top of that – only a few percent of visits to our site are on mobile Safari, so it hardly seems worth the effort.
Well, OSNews RSS feed is not really that great.
All I get is big blob of text. No formatting, no links, no nothing.
Because of the score: If you want links and formatting use this instead:
http://feed43.com/osnews.xml
My guess is that OSnews is trying to get you to watch ads on their website, but providing bad userXP just to make money is not really a good way to make money IMO.
PS. If you need tags edit the feed via http://feed43.com/feed.html?name=osnews
Edited 2015-06-12 06:28 UTC
Umm. Apple News supports RSS. You just need to submit it. How is making content available to your users where they actually read content a bad thing?
Hi guys, the important in OSnews is the content and at some extent, the comments; so, stop crying and enjoy using it.
Remember those days when it said “Best viewed on internet Explorer?” Maybe we will start seeing more of “Not Designed for Safari/iOS”
Speaking of Ad supported Services: “What Apple’s Tim Cook Overlooked in His Defense of Privacy” – http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/11/technology/what-apples-tim-cook-o…