Adblock farms out acceptable ad policy to independent reviewer

After you download and install the app, you’ll have to follow the instructions on how to activate the content blocking features of Adblock Plus within your system-wide iOS settings. And what does it mean for users, publishers, businesses and advertisers? Should we the users be forced to download unwanted megabytes to begrudge them a livelihood?

Plus, not all tracking is irritating. There’s no opportunity for disclosure, negotiation, or reconsideration.

That’s why the implied-contract theory is invalid: “people aren’t agreeing to write a blank check and give up reasonable expectations of privacy by clicking a link”. They are also subverting the ones out there to make sure they get paid for delivering news and entertainment. At least it held first place before Mr. Arment pulled the plug after two days. He admitted that Peace was bunker buster bomb, destroying everything, good and bad. Adverts are sold based on impressions or how many times browsers view them or are believed to view them. One must wonder how many purchases of Peace there were during its brief shelf life. Publishers have three other options. Ad blockers are a symptom, not the problem.

But these publisher hostilities are a sideshow to the greater conflagration. With 40 million users as of July 2014 the numbers of users installing ad blocking software is expected to grow even larger. This large torpedo is aimed directly at their various ad sales platforms: AdWords and AdSense.

The Financial Times reported on that earlier this year, adding Amazon to the list of companies paying to get ads past Adblock Plus.

The enormity of the battle is hard to overstate.

Adblock Plus is a free download for mobile users on iOS and Android, and a free browser add-on for Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Maxthon and Opera. This best-selling iOS ad blocker will however let advertisers pay so that their ads can bypass Crystal’s restrictions. At the end of the day, the mobile consumer will dictate preference by their clicks.

It could also be that a few users prefer that Purify allows for whitelisting sites they choose, something not possible with Crystal. So how might this courageous new world look?

I’m more irritated by the data gathering that goes on in the more scruple-free corners of the industry. An alternative is “native advertising”.

Readers have grown increasingly exhausted of web advertisements in form of persistent banner ads, popups and videos that automatically start playing when a page is loading. And if an ad isn’t displayed, it can not generate income for the website in question. The internet is largely funded by advertisements.

The IAB has been less discreet, with CEO Randall Rothenberg calling it extortion. And then there is the whole matter of how retailers generate around 60% of their mobile web traffic inorganically, via online ads that Crystal and other ad-blockers are created to eliminate. It seems that people are just getting fed up with how cumbersome browsing has become. Adapt or die…your choice. Of that $187 billion, the fastest growing sector of advertising, digital, has increased 2.5 percent from 2014. We went across a number of ad-ridden sites to find little change in what we saw before and after downloading the tool.

And in this weekend’s Observer, John Naughton, who writes a weekly column on tech and its implications, was in no doubt that ad blocking will effectively kill off the online ad industry. By country, Poland, Argentina, and Sweden have ad-blocking rates of about one-third of their populations.

Eyeo has been accused of holding publishers to ransom by charging to have ads served to users of its ad-blocking software. He and other IAB leaders throughout Ad Week have said the industry group is open to launching litigation of its own against the service.

Google’s 2014 market share for search is still a commanding 62% on desktop and a staggering 89% of mobile.