Google makes money from ads, and now Microsoft is shifting towards that strategy with Win 10 being free etc. Apple on the other hand makes money from hardware, app store, 30% or whatever it is on ebooks and inapp purchases. I'm not really THAT surprised - only so much as I thought Apple would want a slice out of both pies, but it stands to reason that they can bleed much more from Google by blocking ads than they could gain from partnering with (or creating) ad networks.
Apple is only blocking internet ads, not in-app ads, which makes it obvious that they're targeting content creators to push them to either Apple newsstand or iOS apps, where Apple gets a cut of the ads.
It's disappointing because Apple is using their mobile marketshare to attack and fragment the open web. Users either don't understand or don't care because they have cognitive bias towards ads to begin with - e.g. people only attribute negative ad experiences to ads, never good experiences (w/ few exceptions like the superbowl).
Ads considerably degrade the browsing experience on mobile.
Most ads used to be in Flash which was blocked by default since not working on Ios, then everything turned into big and slow HTML5 stunts to replace Flash, which has the exact same effect as Flash : battery drain,... .
Apple, on the other hand controls the in-app anything experience.
Not saying to it's right , just saying that how Apple justifies its strategy.
To be clear, Apple is not blocking any ads. They are providing browser hooks to let people create ad blockers, just like (say) Google does on desktop Chrome. The difference is important.
Apple is not blocking any ads. iAd makes little money and Apple is letting apps that block iAds into the app store. I know some people will oppose Apple no matter what they do but in this case they and the majority of users are right and you are wrong. People have a negative view of advertising for a very good reason.