Manuel Moreale:
Am I scamming YouTube because I block their awful ads? Would I be scamming YouTube if I muted the video and looked at something else while ads were playing? What’s the scam here? Who is getting scammed?
If using an ad blocker is scamming publishers that rely on advertising revenue, then I expect everyone making this argument to have the pop-up blocker feature disabled in their web browser.
➝ Source: manuelmoreale.com
Mike Conley, writing in Firefox Nightly News:
- Again, a reminder that Mozilla plans to continue support for the Manifest v2 blocking WebRequest API (this API powers, for example, uBlock Origin) while simultaneously supporting Manifest v3.
I’m sticking with Brave for the time being, but if something happens upstream in Chromium that prevents them from fully supporting ad blockers, I’ll be looking at Firefox as an alternative.
➝ Source: blog.nightly.mozilla.org
If you’re looking for a Mac content blocker, Ben Brooks suggests Ghostery and I couldn’t agree more.
The New York Times:
Ad blockers, which Apple first allowed on the iPhone in September, promise to conserve data and make websites load faster. But how much of your mobile data comes from advertising? We measured the mix of advertising and editorial on the mobile home pages of the top 50 news websites – including ours – and found that more than half of all data came from ads and other content filtered by ad blockers.
The results are absolutely atrocious for some of the sites — Boston.com being by far the worst.
Marco Arment:
Today, Apple made the decision for me, in a way that I didn’t even think was possible, and I’m actually happy — or at least, as happy as someone can be who just made a lot of money on a roller coaster of surprise, guilt, and stress, then lost it all suddenly in a giant, unexpected reset that actually resolves things pretty well.
Ben Brooks tested all of the ad blockers available in the App Store and found 1Blocker to be the fastest. His test included pages from several different websites including iMore, Bloomberg, and The New Yorker. I was very happy to see that Adamant — a blocker which displays ads from networks like The Deck by default — made it into the top three.
Dave Mark is compiling a list of iOS 9 content blockers. I suggest checking it again in a week or two to see if any innovative and interesting ones show up.
It sounds like the ad industry is pretty upset about this whole ad blocking trend. But I hate to break it to them, they’re going to lose. Users are getting sick and tired of being attacked by a tirade of advertisements when they visit a webpage and they’re going to use all the tools available to them in order to make browsing the web an enjoyable experience.
I understand the other side of things, though. Advertising companies are afraid of going out of business and rightfully so. Nobody wants to be out of a job, especially when there’s a possibility that the entire industry could be uprooted. But there has to be a way to continue displaying ads that ensure publishers get paid, advertisers get paid, the companies paying for the ads get business, and the users aren’t bombarded with JavaScript.
I can tell you one thing for sure, blocking user access if they use an ad blocker isn’t the way to do it. That’s only going to push users to more extreme measures in order to view the content they want. And that’s if they come back at all. There must be a more sane approach to this problem, I just wish there were more creative people in the ad industry that could find it.
(Via Pixel Envy.)
