Apple's iOS 9 brings ad blocking to the center

After Apple announced that it was going after Google's main revenue stream, publisher's became increasingly worried about users blocking ads, which support most of the content generation online.

Studies suggest that ad blocking is costing publishers about $22 billion per year. While ad-blockers developers state that their products are necessary to keep the industry running and help publishers to stay in control of the context in which their content is shown, digital ads companies disagree. It is true that completely blocking all ads because some of them may be very intruding and hurt the users' experience seems to be an overkill. But the industry should think about why users are increasingly adopting ad-blockers and what they should do in the future.

It looks that there are two ways out of this conflict: the industry starts to auto regulate and users will cease to demand ad-blocking software or, alternatively, a compromise solution can be found, like it happened in the music industry and piracy.

This battle will be decided in the next few years but it is clear that some action will have to be taken, otherwise free content will cease to exist, and users are not very fond of paying for it.


Public's love for ad blockers infuriating publishers

Unethical or not, the Internet should take concrete actions to prevent the use of Ad blocker software

Among other benefits, the existence of digital advertising makes it possible to have free content on the digital media space. Advertising also subsidizes the cost of apps, which can take hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce, but are often free or low-priced.

However, ads have become more and more intrusive for the internet users and, as always that there is a problem to be solved, some companies found it and developed softwares to block ads, and 34% of U.S. adults are using them.

This is clearly impacting the revenue of many digital content producers and publishers and most of them claim that it is unethical to block ads and not paying for content at the same time. However, unethical or not, it is challenging to rely on individual consciousness on whether to use these softwares or not. The internet should take concrete actions to prevent the usage of these softwares. But, what is the appropriate action?  Should websites “curate” ads and only show the least intrusive to the users so to provide a better experience to them or should they block access to their web sites to people that block ads altogether, or both?

http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/ad-blocking-unnecessary-internet-apocalypse/300470/