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Can someone explain to me why this whole ad blocking fiasco has blown up in the past 3 days? Why was iOS's inclusion of ad blocking capabilities the turning po

Can someone explain to me why this whole ad blocking fiasco has blown up in the past 3 days? Why was iOS's inclusion of ad blocking capabilities the turning point in what seemed to be an already-unstoppable movement towards a return to sanity for the web? Why is everyone so scared of ad shops/website owners having to change their business models? I don't understand the hype.

vortico 11y ago
I should add that if you had control over the software you use (similar to the classic idea of a human programming a machine), then this debate would not exist. Those willing to use adblockers would install or create them, and nobody would have to wait on Apple to be excited about using them.
- gaius 11y ago
  Apple hasn't included ad blocking - they have merely provided APIs for ad blocking software to run on iOS devices. You still have to go to the app store and download one. But these APIs didn't exist before so ad blocking was impossible on iOS.
  - seanp2k2 11y ago
    Impossible without a jailbreak or e.g. the willingness to set up Privoxy on your home net and configure it to proxy your wifi traffic. There are ways, but this will be a million times easier.
mineshaftgap 11y ago
A large portion of the upper end of the market is running iOS. Real money is at stake.
minikites 11y ago
My thought is that it's because a big company is behind it and we would see the same thing if Microsoft did it for IE or (in bizarro land) if Google did this with Chrome.
chimeracoder 11y ago
> Why was iOS's inclusion of ad blocking capabilities the turning point in what seemed to be an already-unstoppable movement towards a return to sanity for the web? Because iOS was the last major platform on which true adblocking was (AFAIK) completely impossible until this week. Desktop browsers have had adblocking for ages, and even non-rooted Android devices can block ads in webpages (root is required only to block ads in native apps).
- zuck9 11y ago
  > completely impossible There were many 3rd party browsers on the App Store with ad blocking support since iOS 4 or earlier.
  - jonknee 11y ago
    But no way to set them as the default browser so links that open up from apps were still opening in Safari with the ads.
    - seanp2k2 11y ago
      Jailbreak made it possible, or you could set up an ad-blocking proxy on your network.
      - jonknee 11y ago
        Yes or now any of dozens of apps in the App Store which is what makes it a turning point.
- orkoden 11y ago
  It wasn't impossible. There were basically two solution up until now: use an alternative browser with ad blocking included (e.g. iCab), or a VPN that filters ads for you.
  - lorenzhs 11y ago
TillE 11y ago
The quick answer: American tech journalists. Their audiences are the most likely to run iOS and know how to use an ad blocker. They're terrified, they write a bunch of articles, and it spreads around a little. I'd be really interested to see some data over the next few weeks, so we can determine whether their fears were justified.
- benihana 11y ago
  After reading your response it occurs to me that they're streisand effecting themselves. If they'd have just shut up, most people wouldn't even be aware of the adblocking capabilities in iOS 9. Each article they write brings more attention to the thing they're afraid is going to bury them.
  - user_666 11y ago
    Very much so, yes.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- digi_owl 11y ago
  Its more general than that. Media production in general, and the tech press included, seem to be married to Apple as their tech supplier. So when Apple do something it is suddenly new, even though it has been going on for years or even decades in the larger tech sphere. Never mind that as the western world has been in a slump for nearly a decade, companies has started to reevaluate their spending. And in the process has come to question the impact web ads have.
- Khaine 11y ago
  The whole thing is really being pushed hard by outlets like the verge, and frankly nothing of value would be lost if that site dissapeared
benihana 11y ago
Because numbers seem to point to iOS being the dominant device web browser (Android appears to be installed on many more devices, but people browse the web on their iPhones and iPads). The brouhaha is because the default browser now allows ad blocking. The FUD is about reach. For the record as a guy who uses ad blockers religiously and has also worked in the web ad industry, I think it's completely overblown and not much will change.
- kuschku 11y ago
  * in the US FTFY
brettz 11y ago
I'd rather have a buggy site with a terrible ad that I can avoid than have to pay for all the content I consume. Now that adblock is on iOS everyone is worried that will become the case.
- hellofunk 11y ago
  While that is a fair opinion, mine is on the contrary. Some things are simply more important than money. I'd gladly pay a little bit for quality ad-free experiences rather than endure the frustration of this OP in the linked article, every day, which is my and many's default. Life is short, and it's not always about money but rather quality of life.
olefoo 11y ago
Because most of the people who read and post on new.ycombinator are making money from advertising one way or another. And even if they aren't many of their/our customers are. It's a giant secular shift in the industry and we'll all be affected by it. Business models that looked sound a year ago look shaky now; some investment hypotheses will be thoroughly invalidated and others will be proving out. If you're on the bottom looking up, or the outside looking in; it's going to be awesome. We have the possibility of overturning orthodoxies, the freedom to try new things; etc. But it's not going to be easy. Display ads have actually been pretty crucial to the ecosystem of capitalism so far. They are the primary means by which potential customers are informed of the existence and desirability of products and services.
- bhouston 11y ago
  I agree. Interesting apps are the winner and the web is the only see. Native apps still get to have ads, and thus revenue streams, just not websites. One solution is to push people from web sites to native apps that serve the same content but with ads.
copsarebastards 11y ago
The public discourse on this sort of thing is controlled by media companies, most of whom make the majority of their money from ad revenue. The other player in this game are technologists making ad-blockers. Up to this point, these technologists have been only moderately successful in permeating the market. Ads are so terrible, and ad blockers so effective, that it's a risk for media companies to even talk about ads and ad blockers. It's bad PR for media companies, and an argument against ad-blockers is more likely to simply make more unaware people aware of ad-blockers than it is to persuade ad-blocker users to stop blocking ads. Ad blockers are a problem for media companies, but not a big enough problem to warrant taking the risk of talking about ads. All that changed when Apple decided to include ad blocking in IOS9. Now ad-blocking will permeate a very large portion of the market, and since Apple is a trendsetter in the mobile market, it's likely that other mobile manufacturers will follow suit. Obviously Google is not going to support ad-blocking in Android, but they'll have a hard time preventing Samsung/Motorola/etc. from shipping with their own ad-blocking software. Now it's worth the risk for media companies to talk about ads and ad blockers, because if they don't, their entire business model is going to die anyway. So they're trying to persuade consumers that ads are actually in their best interest so that there will be consumer pressure on Android phone manufacturers to allow ads. I don't think it will work. Consumer pressure only happens when consumers feel pain, and there's no ad-supported media so great that losing it is more painful than ads. The only people who are actually feeling pain from this are people whose businesses are ad-supported, and frankly, I'm quite happy about that: people who tie their business to an immoral, unethical business model should be punished. It's rare that the bad guys actually get what's coming to them. Anyone who is worried that this is going to hurt technologists: it's only going to hurt the ones who deserve it. I've been programming professionally for 10 years and I've never worked for a company whose business model involved advertising because it disgusts me. This doesn't affect me at all. If you decided to hitch your wagon to the advertising horse, that's your fault; you did a bad thing and I don't feel sorry for you.
- hellofunk 11y ago
  It's a shame the ads have to either be totally horrible or totally gone. There is nothing wrong with a bit of advertising, but those who do it these days make it so in-your-face and disruptive, that they have dug their own graves. They should have gone a more subtle route, and maybe no one would think ads were such a big problem, and they could still be there. Since moving to Holland, I've actually enjoyed the ads I see on TV and Youtube; compared to American or Asian standards, where I've previously lived, here they are little short films of creative art that always make me laugh with their wit. If all ads had something positive to offer other than "buy me right now", and they could tactfully get out of your face, everybody could be happy. But that's not what happened.
gcb0 11y ago
it's the san Francisco bubble. anything really small that happens in SF gets blow out of proportion here and in the circles we belong. and since IOS is a driving revenue source for start ups aiming for fame in SF in the hopes to get funding/exit, then anything apple do will drive people crazy here. it's mostly irrelevant anywhere else, we just happen to drive the ephemeral tech press
braythwayt 11y ago
Think about Flash. There have been Flash-blocking technologies on the desktop forever, but they never made much of a dent on the industry. Then came the iPhone, with Flash blocked by fiat. At first, the industry laughed, and said that Apple would be forced to cave and implement Flash support or lose sales to phones that support Flash. Meanwhile, Apple was trying to sell hardware, and Flash makes hardware suck. It runs hot, it sucks up battery, and consumers blame the hardware, not Flash. Who says, “Flash has terrible battery life?” Nobody. They say, “My iPhone barely lasts an afternoon before I need to charge it again.” Flash freeloads on the hardware, because nobody blames it for their bad mobile experience. In hindsight, it’s obvious why Apple refused to support Flash: It degrades the iPhone experience. So Apple “blocked” Flash, and iPhone grew anyways, and it was Flash that got killed by iPhone, not iPhone killed by Flash. Now Apple is making it easy to kill ads. And it’s for the same reason: iPhone owners would rather read certain web sites on their desktop browsers, because the experience of reading on the iPhone is terrible, thanks to ads. They suck up battery and hog the limited viewport. If this had happened five years ago, people would laugh and say Apple was shooting itself in the foot, and that web sites would simply block Apple users that use ad blockers. But having seen what happened to Flash, they realize that there’s a reasonable chance that Apple users blocking ads will take ads to the same place Flash went: The trash can. The web sites that figure out a different business model will beat those that block iOS user who block ads. The newspapers that play along with iAds will beat those who try to serve ads through HTML. And that means the industry could be about to receive a major disruption, one that didn’t happen on the desktop. Just as Flash wasn’t killed by Flash blocking on the desktop, but by Apple refusing to support it on iOS.
manigandham 11y ago
Business models aren't changing. The technology to serve ads will. This a short-term reset though that the industry would do well to capitalize on and change some of the thinking that got us into this mess now.

vortico 11y ago

I should add that if you had control over the software you use (similar to the classic idea of a human programming a machine), then this debate would not exist. Those willing to use adblockers would install or create them, and nobody would have to wait on Apple to be excited about using them.

gaius 11y ago
Apple hasn't included ad blocking - they have merely provided APIs for ad blocking software to run on iOS devices. You still have to go to the app store and download one. But these APIs didn't exist before so ad blocking was impossible on iOS.
- seanp2k2 11y ago
  Impossible without a jailbreak or e.g. the willingness to set up Privoxy on your home net and configure it to proxy your wifi traffic. There are ways, but this will be a million times easier.

mineshaftgap 11y ago

A large portion of the upper end of the market is running iOS. Real money is at stake.

minikites 11y ago

My thought is that it's because a big company is behind it and we would see the same thing if Microsoft did it for IE or (in bizarro land) if Google did this with Chrome.

chimeracoder 11y ago

> Why was iOS's inclusion of ad blocking capabilities the turning point in what seemed to be an already-unstoppable movement towards a return to sanity for the web? Because iOS was the last major platform on which true adblocking was (AFAIK) completely impossible until this week. Desktop browsers have had adblocking for ages, and even non-rooted Android devices can block ads in webpages (root is required only to block ads in native apps).

zuck9 11y ago
> completely impossible There were many 3rd party browsers on the App Store with ad blocking support since iOS 4 or earlier.
- jonknee 11y ago
  But no way to set them as the default browser so links that open up from apps were still opening in Safari with the ads.
  - seanp2k2 11y ago
    Jailbreak made it possible, or you could set up an ad-blocking proxy on your network.
    - jonknee 11y ago
      Yes or now any of dozens of apps in the App Store which is what makes it a turning point.
orkoden 11y ago
It wasn't impossible. There were basically two solution up until now: use an alternative browser with ad blocking included (e.g. iCab), or a VPN that filters ads for you.
- lorenzhs 11y ago

TillE 11y ago

The quick answer: American tech journalists. Their audiences are the most likely to run iOS and know how to use an ad blocker. They're terrified, they write a bunch of articles, and it spreads around a little. I'd be really interested to see some data over the next few weeks, so we can determine whether their fears were justified.

benihana 11y ago
After reading your response it occurs to me that they're streisand effecting themselves. If they'd have just shut up, most people wouldn't even be aware of the adblocking capabilities in iOS 9. Each article they write brings more attention to the thing they're afraid is going to bury them.
- user_666 11y ago
  Very much so, yes.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
digi_owl 11y ago
Its more general than that. Media production in general, and the tech press included, seem to be married to Apple as their tech supplier. So when Apple do something it is suddenly new, even though it has been going on for years or even decades in the larger tech sphere. Never mind that as the western world has been in a slump for nearly a decade, companies has started to reevaluate their spending. And in the process has come to question the impact web ads have.
Khaine 11y ago
The whole thing is really being pushed hard by outlets like the verge, and frankly nothing of value would be lost if that site dissapeared

benihana 11y ago

Because numbers seem to point to iOS being the dominant device web browser (Android appears to be installed on many more devices, but people browse the web on their iPhones and iPads). The brouhaha is because the default browser now allows ad blocking. The FUD is about reach. For the record as a guy who uses ad blockers religiously and has also worked in the web ad industry, I think it's completely overblown and not much will change.

kuschku 11y ago
* in the US FTFY

brettz 11y ago

I'd rather have a buggy site with a terrible ad that I can avoid than have to pay for all the content I consume. Now that adblock is on iOS everyone is worried that will become the case.

hellofunk 11y ago
While that is a fair opinion, mine is on the contrary. Some things are simply more important than money. I'd gladly pay a little bit for quality ad-free experiences rather than endure the frustration of this OP in the linked article, every day, which is my and many's default. Life is short, and it's not always about money but rather quality of life.

olefoo 11y ago

Because most of the people who read and post on new.ycombinator are making money from advertising one way or another. And even if they aren't many of their/our customers are. It's a giant secular shift in the industry and we'll all be affected by it. Business models that looked sound a year ago look shaky now; some investment hypotheses will be thoroughly invalidated and others will be proving out. If you're on the bottom looking up, or the outside looking in; it's going to be awesome. We have the possibility of overturning orthodoxies, the freedom to try new things; etc. But it's not going to be easy. Display ads have actually been pretty crucial to the ecosystem of capitalism so far. They are the primary means by which potential customers are informed of the existence and desirability of products and services.

bhouston 11y ago
I agree. Interesting apps are the winner and the web is the only see. Native apps still get to have ads, and thus revenue streams, just not websites. One solution is to push people from web sites to native apps that serve the same content but with ads.

copsarebastards 11y ago

The public discourse on this sort of thing is controlled by media companies, most of whom make the majority of their money from ad revenue. The other player in this game are technologists making ad-blockers. Up to this point, these technologists have been only moderately successful in permeating the market. Ads are so terrible, and ad blockers so effective, that it's a risk for media companies to even talk about ads and ad blockers. It's bad PR for media companies, and an argument against ad-blockers is more likely to simply make more unaware people aware of ad-blockers than it is to persuade ad-blocker users to stop blocking ads. Ad blockers are a problem for media companies, but not a big enough problem to warrant taking the risk of talking about ads. All that changed when Apple decided to include ad blocking in IOS9. Now ad-blocking will permeate a very large portion of the market, and since Apple is a trendsetter in the mobile market, it's likely that other mobile manufacturers will follow suit. Obviously Google is not going to support ad-blocking in Android, but they'll have a hard time preventing Samsung/Motorola/etc. from shipping with their own ad-blocking software. Now it's worth the risk for media companies to talk about ads and ad blockers, because if they don't, their entire business model is going to die anyway. So they're trying to persuade consumers that ads are actually in their best interest so that there will be consumer pressure on Android phone manufacturers to allow ads. I don't think it will work. Consumer pressure only happens when consumers feel pain, and there's no ad-supported media so great that losing it is more painful than ads. The only people who are actually feeling pain from this are people whose businesses are ad-supported, and frankly, I'm quite happy about that: people who tie their business to an immoral, unethical business model should be punished. It's rare that the bad guys actually get what's coming to them. Anyone who is worried that this is going to hurt technologists: it's only going to hurt the ones who deserve it. I've been programming professionally for 10 years and I've never worked for a company whose business model involved advertising because it disgusts me. This doesn't affect me at all. If you decided to hitch your wagon to the advertising horse, that's your fault; you did a bad thing and I don't feel sorry for you.

hellofunk 11y ago
It's a shame the ads have to either be totally horrible or totally gone. There is nothing wrong with a bit of advertising, but those who do it these days make it so in-your-face and disruptive, that they have dug their own graves. They should have gone a more subtle route, and maybe no one would think ads were such a big problem, and they could still be there. Since moving to Holland, I've actually enjoyed the ads I see on TV and Youtube; compared to American or Asian standards, where I've previously lived, here they are little short films of creative art that always make me laugh with their wit. If all ads had something positive to offer other than "buy me right now", and they could tactfully get out of your face, everybody could be happy. But that's not what happened.

gcb0 11y ago

it's the san Francisco bubble. anything really small that happens in SF gets blow out of proportion here and in the circles we belong. and since IOS is a driving revenue source for start ups aiming for fame in SF in the hopes to get funding/exit, then anything apple do will drive people crazy here. it's mostly irrelevant anywhere else, we just happen to drive the ephemeral tech press

braythwayt 11y ago

Think about Flash. There have been Flash-blocking technologies on the desktop forever, but they never made much of a dent on the industry. Then came the iPhone, with Flash blocked by fiat. At first, the industry laughed, and said that Apple would be forced to cave and implement Flash support or lose sales to phones that support Flash. Meanwhile, Apple was trying to sell hardware, and Flash makes hardware suck. It runs hot, it sucks up battery, and consumers blame the hardware, not Flash. Who says, “Flash has terrible battery life?” Nobody. They say, “My iPhone barely lasts an afternoon before I need to charge it again.” Flash freeloads on the hardware, because nobody blames it for their bad mobile experience. In hindsight, it’s obvious why Apple refused to support Flash: It degrades the iPhone experience. So Apple “blocked” Flash, and iPhone grew anyways, and it was Flash that got killed by iPhone, not iPhone killed by Flash. Now Apple is making it easy to kill ads. And it’s for the same reason: iPhone owners would rather read certain web sites on their desktop browsers, because the experience of reading on the iPhone is terrible, thanks to ads. They suck up battery and hog the limited viewport. If this had happened five years ago, people would laugh and say Apple was shooting itself in the foot, and that web sites would simply block Apple users that use ad blockers. But having seen what happened to Flash, they realize that there’s a reasonable chance that Apple users blocking ads will take ads to the same place Flash went: The trash can. The web sites that figure out a different business model will beat those that block iOS user who block ads. The newspapers that play along with iAds will beat those who try to serve ads through HTML. And that means the industry could be about to receive a major disruption, one that didn’t happen on the desktop. Just as Flash wasn’t killed by Flash blocking on the desktop, but by Apple refusing to support it on iOS.

manigandham 11y ago

Business models aren't changing. The technology to serve ads will. This a short-term reset though that the industry would do well to capitalize on and change some of the thinking that got us into this mess now.