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by bduerst 3907 days ago
It's an aggressive strategy.

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).

4 comments

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.
Does anyone have a positive experience with ads on mobile?
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.