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I've always been puzzled as to why everyone suddenly thought that the adblocking apocalypse was about to happen. I mean, adblockers have been around for many y

I've always been puzzled as to why everyone suddenly thought that the adblocking apocalypse was about to happen. I mean, adblockers have been around for many years. Every browser that supports third-party extensions has adblockers available. Which, until this year, has effectively meant all browsers except mobile Safari. So the one last holdout browser finally gains adblocker support, and this is going to be the tipping point that kills ads as a revenue source for web publishers? Does mobile Safari really have that big a majority of usage among all browsers? And even if it does, is such a huge majority of mobile Safari users going to install adblockers? Though techical people tend to forget this, the internet is now mainstream, and the vast majority of web users are non-technical people. These are people who just use whatever software is built comes with their device, never change defaults, and never install any software whose installation/configuration is any more difficult than pressing "Buy" on the app store. So, again, it always seemed strange to me that mobile Safari in iOS 9 (finally) getting adblocker support resulted in all this panic about the adblocking apocalypse being upon us.

donohoe 11y ago
One good reason, which I think may still have an impact in long-run is bandwidth. At office or home on your cable/DSL/whatever you really don't care about bandwidth. However on mobile, blocking ads has a bigger impact beyond aesthetics and basic UX * Pages load much much faster * Mobile users typically have data-plans with limits I have an old unlimited plan with AT&T. I've just installed the ad-blocker from Mozilla. Previously when I had Peace I say my data usage drop by 30% (that I can account for. It may be higher). I typically use 3.2GB a month. It was down to 1.8GB (again, there are other factors)
- acdha 11y ago
  You're definitely right to point at bandwidth, particularly since at least in the United States the major carriers have been pushing customers back to paid plans. A closely-related issue is the nature of the content: it would be one thing if ads/trackers were just image content but a lot of them ship huge amounts of poorly-written JavaScript and CSS, usually marked as uncacheable or with a short TTL. I'm not talking about fly-by-night operators, either, but places like Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc. which have good web performance teams who are apparently strictly prohibited from talking to the ad / tracking / widget groups. All of that extra bloat has a huge performance impact to begin with but it also dramatically amplifies any network delays. That means that most of the people who read a piece about blockers and try one are likely to notice a big performance win and that initial impression will stick with them for a long time.
aikah 11y ago
> adblocking apocalypse on Mobile. It has already happened on desktop. Ad blockers have severely hurt the bottom line of publishers. > the vast majority of web users are non-technical people But these non-technical people aren't dumb. I showed my mom how to install ad-block on Firefox, she then showed that to her many friends, who then showed it to their friends. Installing an ad-blocking plugin is easy.
- untog 11y ago
  ...but still most don't do it. It's been possible to install an ad-blocking mobile browser on Android for a long, long time. People haven't done it.
nsgi 11y ago
> Which, until this year, has effectively meant all browsers except mobile Safari. And mobile Chrome, so all but the two most popular mobile browsers.

donohoe 11y ago

One good reason, which I think may still have an impact in long-run is bandwidth. At office or home on your cable/DSL/whatever you really don't care about bandwidth. However on mobile, blocking ads has a bigger impact beyond aesthetics and basic UX * Pages load much much faster * Mobile users typically have data-plans with limits I have an old unlimited plan with AT&T. I've just installed the ad-blocker from Mozilla. Previously when I had Peace I say my data usage drop by 30% (that I can account for. It may be higher). I typically use 3.2GB a month. It was down to 1.8GB (again, there are other factors)

acdha 11y ago
You're definitely right to point at bandwidth, particularly since at least in the United States the major carriers have been pushing customers back to paid plans. A closely-related issue is the nature of the content: it would be one thing if ads/trackers were just image content but a lot of them ship huge amounts of poorly-written JavaScript and CSS, usually marked as uncacheable or with a short TTL. I'm not talking about fly-by-night operators, either, but places like Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc. which have good web performance teams who are apparently strictly prohibited from talking to the ad / tracking / widget groups. All of that extra bloat has a huge performance impact to begin with but it also dramatically amplifies any network delays. That means that most of the people who read a piece about blockers and try one are likely to notice a big performance win and that initial impression will stick with them for a long time.

aikah 11y ago

> adblocking apocalypse on Mobile. It has already happened on desktop. Ad blockers have severely hurt the bottom line of publishers. > the vast majority of web users are non-technical people But these non-technical people aren't dumb. I showed my mom how to install ad-block on Firefox, she then showed that to her many friends, who then showed it to their friends. Installing an ad-blocking plugin is easy.

untog 11y ago
...but still most don't do it. It's been possible to install an ad-blocking mobile browser on Android for a long, long time. People haven't done it.

nsgi 11y ago

> Which, until this year, has effectively meant all browsers except mobile Safari. And mobile Chrome, so all but the two most popular mobile browsers.