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Apple's "evil/genius" plan to punk the web and gild the iPad
- kylemathews 16y agoOr in other words, Safari's reader is going to kill our page views and ad click-through rates and we're mad about that because we're not getting rich on Apple's app store like everyone else.
- wmf 16y agoIf Ars believes that there's more money to be made from the App Store than from the Web, they're welcome to release an app.
- devinj 16y agoNo they're not. They're welcome to submit an app to approval. They have no freedom to control what gets released.
- blocke 16y agoSo what is the point of the web if people have to get permission to publish native apps to make money off their own content?
- wmf 16y agoI agree that Apple is screwing things up, but I don't think Ars is complaining out of self-interest.
- blocke 16y agoWasn't Ars the site that was whining at it's readers about how adblocking screws them? It would fit in with their previous complaints.
- loewenskind 16y agoHow does blocking ads that I'm not going to click screw anyone? Surely no one pays for their ads to just appear on a web page. If they do I think they're getting ripped off. Until I started hearing people talk about how scary targeted ads were I never even knew. I don't run ad block but I don't even notice the ads. I had to consciously look to see if they were targeted. I saw they were, said "oh, that's scary" and went back to my regular browsing. A result of growing up on public TV I guess.
- gte910h 16y agoBlock them then.
- masklinn 16y agoThing is, it's not even going to do that. You have to be on the (first) page to trigger Reader, so you'll see ads anyway, and it will fetch all the pages one by one when reformatting them. They just built Readability in the browser (literally, there are acknowledgements to Readability in Saf 5)
- ojbyrne 16y agoI suddenly reflected on the absurdity of a. paying for hardware b. paying for apps c. paying for airtime ... in order to see ads.
- sjwright 16y agoFortunately, you probably won't be seeing ads if (b) is true. Or if you are, demand a refund.
- leviathant 16y agoThe probability of not seeing ads if (b) is true will drop throughout the years, if cable television is any indicator.
- cmelbye 16y agoThere will always be the "high quality app" sector, and ads are simply too ugly to fit in with the carefully tailored user interfaces of the high end apps, even if Apple does make a few changes to make the ads look at least a little bit more aesthetically pleasing.
- dlsspy 16y agoThis is why I canceled cable many years ago. I was paying for it, as well as TiVo service and getting lots of ads, including ads on the shows I was watching.
- RyanMcGreal 16y agoIn fairness, when you pay for cable you're paying for the distribution of the TV channels you watch. The programming itself is funded through ad revenue. (Disclosure: I haven't had cable in about ten years.)
- dlsspy 16y agoI understand what they thought they were selling me. It had no bearing on how frustrated I was sitting there thinking ``Really? I'm paying money to see this?''
- chaosmachine 16y ago"Reader mode seems to only be available on pages that the browser thinks are articles" Someone will write a javascript workaround that stops "reader mode" from triggering. If it's just a simple heuristic, it should be easy to defeat.
- mechanical_fish 16y agoOn the other hand, if the heuristic is "pay a bunch of Mechanical Turkers five cents per website to classify typical pages from websites as 'articles' or 'not articles'" it's going to be pretty difficult to defeat. Why bother with artificial intelligence when the real thing is so inexpensive? Indeed, you might not even have to pay. Just build a system to report bugs. People may happily self-report when their adblocker fails to function on pages where they want it to function. I suppose there might be tricks, like chopping your page up into misarranged divs and then unshuffling them with CSS and/or JS, that make it really hard to scrape the content for Articles, even if you know that the page should be an article. That class of hacks will cost you in accessibility, though, and they can't be great for SEO.
- chaosmachine 16y agoYou can avoid any major SEO problems by only serving the modified version to iPads (As long as it's providing proper user agent information, that's easy, but there are other ways to detect it as well). In fact, if you really want to go all out, you could just serve the entire website as a rendered image to iPad users.
- joe_the_user 16y agoYou could even cut your site into tables or divs but with the table-boundaries not corresponding to the text/ad boundaries. The possibilities are endless. I think the reason folks don't it now is that add blockers are not ubiquitous. The only way web filtering works is if the display mechanism and the meaning of page displayed roughly correspond. If someone decides to start massively filtering the web in a way that doesn't serve the original site owner, the site owner can certainly start serving content that displays correctly but is hard to filter.
- rubinelli 16y agoHow come Apple always pulls off stuff Microsoft would never get away with?
- mechanical_fish 16y agoI'd reverse the question: Why doesn't Firefox already do this out of the box? It's not as if adblocking is a particularly new concept. This is ten-year-old technology. It's not as if adblocking isn't known to be something people want: Geeks use it all the time.
- tvon 16y agoApple doesn't have a monopoly on anything. Still, they seem intent on pushing the limits.
- Enlightenment 16y ago
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- hinting 16y agoYes, it's a grand conspiracy. The only other possible explanation would be: 1) Readability got popular. It's a good idea so they baked it into the browser. 2) There is plenty of money in ads. Apple decided they wanted some of this money instead of funneling it to a direct competitor. I prefer the conspiracy idea myself.
- masklinn 16y ago> Readability got popular. It's a good idea so they baked it into the browser. Also, Instapaper. Marco Arment (IP developer) once wrote that some people use IP not for articles they want to read later but for articles they want to read right now, just because it's so good at making articles readable.
- ilovecomputers 16y agoReading this Ken Fisher article was akin to reading a blog post. This is why I look to authors like John Siracusa for quality articles on Ars Technica. This article however, is just a giant assumption that is likely to not be true.
- yumraj 16y agoI find what Apple is attempting to be absolutely ridiculous and rather brazen. I won't be surprised that if the Safari reader mode becomes popular, the big content provider and news sites start blocking Safari.
- rimantas 16y agoI doubt there is a way to detect is someone uses this mode or not. Safari loads the full page, and then you have an option to trigger reader mode, which does not even replace the page: it's like lightbox for images: original page is dimmed and you get nicely formatted text in front of it.
- yumraj 16y agoNot sure why I was downmodded above, but: I had meant websites can start blocking Safari as a browser and not just the Safari reader-mode. Since Safari is effectively changing the way a content provider wants to display their websites and directly impact how they make money, especially important for news sites, both big and small, no one should be surprised if they revert to that. If I was CNN, NYTimes, etc., I would do that.
- risotto 16y agoNobody uses Safari and a fraction of this nobody uses Readability (however apple brands it) Chrome and Firefox have a plugin architecture and ad block. Jailbreak you iPad and block iAds in /etc/hosts Enjoy modern life and the Internet and gadgets.
- blocke 16y agoChrome and Firefox have a plugin architecture and don't have ad block built-in as shipped. Huge difference there. (On a sidenote I'm still using Firefox over Chrome as Firefox is still the superior adblock platform. ;)
- masklinn 16y ago> Chrome and Firefox have a plugin architecture and don't have ad block built-in as shipped. Huge difference there. What difference? Safari 5 has a plugin architecture and doesn't have ad block built-in as shipped.
- swaroop 16y agoFYI, Safari 5 has extensions - http://www.apple.com/safari/whats-new.html#developer_program http://www.apple.com/safari/whats-new.html#developer_program
- CoryMathews 16y agoOr... download Opera and the ad block is built in.
- philwelch 16y agoA company isn't like a single group of people, really. It's more like a confederation of affiliated fiefdoms. Some companies are worse than others in this regard (for instance, you can actually find pirated copies of Windows 7 by searching on Bing: http://www.bing.com/search?q=%2bpirate+windows+7&FORM=RCRE http://www.bing.com/search?q=%2bpirate+windows+7&FORM=RC...) but even Apple is somewhat affected. In one office, one group of people working on Safari decided Readability was a good idea worthy of reimplementation. In another office, possibly another building, another group of people decided iAd would be a good idea. Any higher ups, including Steve, probably agreed with both assessments without thinking to put the two together, because they have far more important work to do than designing absurd conspiracies to "punk the web and gild the iPad".
- cobralibre 16y agoThis is certainly true of many companies and may well be true of Apple, too, though it doesn't really fit the prevailing narrative we have of Apple as a company precisely steered by an extremely hands-on executive team. Personally, I'm tickled by this silly and completely implausible variant of the "corporation as federation" idea: That the the executive team is focused on the iOS platform to such an extent that the desktop Safari team implemented Reader -- "annoying ads" marketing and all -- simply to see if they could get away with it.
- philwelch 16y agoWhy would it a matter of "if they could get away with it"? It's a genuinely good feature. What I am saying is that it's highly implausible that the executive team deliberately set out to advantage iAds by reimplementing Readability in the Mac version of Safari. (If Mobile Safari had Reader--where it would be even more useful--then some suspicion could be warranted.)
- cobralibre 16y agoBear in mind that you're responding to a bit of fanciful musing which was explicitly signaled by the phrase "I'm tickled by this silly and completely implausible... idea" -- the idea being that the Reader feature is a public thumbing of the nose towards the iAds initiative, made possible by upper management's ostensible neglect of Apple's desktop software.
- Enlightenment 16y agoHere is what will happen...web pages will detect viewing from an iCrap device, then customize web page to work around CrabApple issues. http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/05/28/web-development-for-the-iphone-and-ipad-getting-started/ http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/05/28/web-development-f...
- alsomike 16y agoThe only publishers that this will affect are the ones that ignore readability and user experience. That's the only time you'd use this feature. I think letting users punish poor design is brilliant way to create the right incentives.
- evo_9 16y agoTo me this is more about Apple attacking back at Google. Jobs made a comment about how it wasn't them (Apple) that entered their (Googles) market referring to Googles entering the smartphone market. Apple is attacking Google on two fronts - the Web, a move to hit Google in the money belt via Reader and it's ad-blocking features; secondly, copying Google's advertising monetization methods to reap potentially Google like (aka huge) profits via iAd, and again limit/control Google/other advertising platforms's on their iOS's. I got to hand it to Apple, it's a pretty good strategy. I suspect they won't suffer much backlash from this hypocrisy beyond the tech crowd though.
- joe_the_user 16y agoIt really doesn't matter who hit first. Apple and Google have different and conflicting business models (and arguably views of the world). Their war is inevitable. Both companies are in it for profit but that's not what I care about. I am Google partisan in the war simply because Google's model seems to imply an open world whereas Apple's model seems to imply a closed world.
- av500 16y agoDoes anybody remember the time when articles on the web were mostly single page (and you scrolled down to read them - hey mice even have scroll wheels for that)? Then the ads people figured that they can cram in more ads by splitting articles every 10 lines and reading them became totally annoying. If Apple can force the content back to single page, I am all for it...
- paulnelligan 16y agoSomehow I don't think the web will even miss a beat as a result of this. Content will still live on, People will still use computers to browse. I'm pretty sure I'll still be able to get news from my favourite sources, maybe those people with iPads and iPhones will pay for this content for me by watching ads. That's fine with me! I had an iPhone which broke after 15 months, and have ordered an Android phone and couldn't be happier about it. I really don't feel like I'm missing out on anything.
- tomlin 16y agoArticle has some good points, but even my somewhat temperate view of Apple (I find the type of devotion a little like Scientology, to be honest) doesn't make me believe "Reader" is a nefarious scheme to overtake advertising -- although I am sure that wouldn't be looked down upon internally.
- protomyth 16y agoI saw this feature and thought of the built-in Universal Access on the Macs. Going along those lines, a lot of pages have way too small text and this is a more convenient way of reading those pages then constantly adjusting font sizes.
- mambodog 16y agoI see this as a good thing for the web. Now websites (that are serving articles) have to compete with the layout/presentation of Reader, both in terms of having nice, readable typography and layout, and having appealing, non-obnoxious ads, like some of the higher end of print ads.