A revolution in blocking online advertising is coming (Part 1)

With the arrival of iOS 9, advertisers, site owners and even Google itself will have a hard time.

In short : In September, the new Apple iOS 9 operating system will be released, in which revolutionary changes will occur in the advertising blocking mechanism. Innovations will have far-reaching implications not only for websites and advertisers, but also, perhaps, affect the balance in the world of mobile platforms and even Google’s revenue.

Why is that? Let's try to figure it out.

Remember the newspapers?

In relatively old times, advertisements appeared in print, on radio and television. Most of the online news publications that make a profit from advertising began as print publications.
')
One of the features of the print ads was that they always remained where they were printed.

Print advertising market lived by simple principles. Advertisers bought a place, editors could refuse them or sometimes not publish an ad if it was not well combined with the main article, causing an awkward situation. Such an example would be the appearance of advertising shoes on a page with a story about people who were crushed by a roller (in this case, the ad would be moved to another page). It was not easy for advertisers to track print ads, although they could use codes and other methods that would help them understand where customers saw the ad (if the latter would have addressed them directly).

With the advent of the Internet, it became possible to track exactly which ads people saw, on which they clicked. Later, it came to an understanding that you can monitor advertising on various sites using the appropriate cookies and scripts.

Now we see how many news websites have appeared (some of them are only rewriting, sometimes automatic, sometimes not), and advertising has flooded them. An attempt by Nilay Patel from The Verge to accuse mobile browsers of insufficient toolkit received a reasoned response from Les Orchard, who pointed out the enormous amount of information that a simple page is requesting.

And this is what we have at the moment: websites are overloaded with ads, tracking tools and scripts that pile up on each other in an attempt to gather information - all to the last - about our actions from each page.

But nobody asked us, readers, whether we agree with this situation. And now more and more people decide for themselves: no, they do not agree.

Block this ad!

The introduction of Adblock and its paid colleague Adblock Plus (the author’s wrong statement, because Adblock Plus is absolutely free, and Adblock collects donations - translator’s note) was gradual, but now these services have more than 150 million users, and their number is growing. People are unhappy with the appearance of pages that are overloaded with ads that pop up without their consent, are unhappy with the very idea that they are being watched without their consent. The latter is especially annoying to people after the information disclosed by Mr. Snowden. Well, I came to your site, perpetuate this fact. But you are watching me, where would I go on the Internet? This is unacceptable.

Also, people are annoyed by the possible behaviors of advertising if they view it online. I have never come across the fact that a print ad could do the following:

• Fill in the entire page that I am trying to read, and hang there, insisting that I either wait or click on a certain part of the page to get to the article for which I came to the site.
• Jump on the page right before the article I read and ask me to subscribe to the newsletter.
• Start automatically scrolling promotional videos while I read some text.
• Infect my computer with advertising viruses.
• Run the Javascript script, which will require some kind of “ransom” from me, otherwise I will be severely punished by blocking everything in the world, unless I just press the “OK” button.
• Transfer me from my text, which I read, to a completely different page and demand that I download some kind of “left” application.

Maybe you can offer other examples (I myself did not have problems with viruses and Javascript, but other people complain about this).

Apple: Say no to advertising!

And here comes Apple, jealously caring about the experience that users of the iOS platform, which brings the company a huge profit. The leaders and employees of the "apple empire" are not alien to what is happening - they also have telephones, and they also meet with annoying ads. The company at the forefront of putting the user experience, so Apple decided that it does not like the experience that offers the user a modern Internet with advertising support, and with this we must do something. As a result, there are programs that block content for Safari (and all web browsers) on iOS 9, which were not presented at the WWDC conference, but became one of the most memorable moments when viewing the settings on the first beta version of iOS 9 (Link in the previous sentence explains what do content blocking programs on iOS 9 do and what doesn't?) Appeared and the news portal Apple News, which is "the same thing as all the newsmen, but without a pile of shit."

On mobile devices, the situation with the intrusion of intrusive advertising into the lives of users is even worse than on conventional computers, as people are more sensitive to the amount of downloadable information due to the fact that their phones can not always boast of special power, and the load of advertising pages is loaded longer.

You can use some applications that block advertisements on Android (although the reviews about the main ad blocker are quite contradictory), but you will not be able to use Adblock Plus (the author’s strange statement, the latter can be downloaded on Android on the official website - translator’s comment) . You can try Ghostery (which will show you exactly what your actions are tracked) on Android. But there is nothing like this at the moment for iOS.

This will change soon, and I think that the emergence of iOS 9 with extensions to block ads will cause a storm of emotions among both users and advertisers.

For clarification: ad blocking extensions are not built into iOS 9, but they can be used. But people are already working on them. You will have to download and install them in the same way as, for example, keyboard layouts from third-party developers.

Here is a video of how one of these applications works, created by Chris Aljoidi:


These programs will be paid (at least at first), but it will be difficult to ignore tweets and Facebook posts about how people are happy with the Internet without ads. Carl Howe remarked: "Whether you like it or not, but after Apple makes a real blocking of ads in their browsers, people who do not want to be followed are automatically selected products of this brand." It also focuses on another message of the company: Apple does not follow what you are doing when using Apple products.

After all this happens with mobile devices, it will come to stationary computers. “How can I install an ad blocker application on my PC?” Will be a frequently asked question. People will arm themselves with similar programs, and then websites will face a real problem.

Moral issue

At this stage, it is worthwhile to stop and think: “why, in the first place, did the advertising flood the Internet?” The right question. Because it is advertising that monetizes content. In some (well, almost all) cases, advertising pays the cost of all content. Rene Ritchie (iMore Renee) from iMore explains this by saying that these days sites rely on getting advertising resources to fill all the free space on the pages. Many agencies are vying to fill the space with the most profitable advertising for the lowest (for the advertiser) price that the site owner will accept.

It is worth pondering what Ritchie wrote:

While we sell premium ads directly to advertisers, it only fills a small portion of the necessary advertising resources to support the network. About 85% of last month’s ads were “software” - provided by advertising exchanges like Google ADX and Appnexus. This ad resembles black boxes. We get the tag, insert it, and an advertisement appears.

Each ad gets its own iframe, so the download is asynchronous, and the whole site will not fall even if the ad does not load. Unfortunately, this also means that each ad has its own tracking tools, even if they are identical for all ads. This is terribly ineffective.

We tried to find or invent a way to streamline them, but we could not. They are built into the very foundation of all major advertising and social networks, ostensibly to provide more relevant content.

As soon as a good advertisement is removed after a certain period of time, the space allocated for advertising is again given under the “remnants of luxury”, which, in turn, deteriorate more and more with updates to the site.

We also do not have the ability to initially sort the advertising coming from the advertising exchanges. We get what we are given. We have established a set of rules. For example, you can not post automatically playable advertising audio files or video clips. But in any case, they slip us, even Google. It is not clear whether the advertisers do this by inattention, or they specifically want to bypass the rules and not be caught in it. We can not answer this question. But this happens all the time.

So even the sites themselves do not control advertising. It is so far from the world of printed “paper” editions, where the editor could reject or move the advertisement, that it even scares.

This lack of control (the crazy desire and need of advertisers to get as much as possible without any attention to what kind of user experience the reader can get from this) leads people to install ad-blocking applications. This is one of the varieties of the tragedy of universal resources.

To be continued...