IOS ad-blocker Crystal to allow ads through for payment

Chances are they’re a minor distraction, a rectangle or square that you’re used to ignoring. The leading vendors of response systems to ad blockers – PageFair and Sourcepoint – use as their calling card primary research on the extent of blocking and the demographics and motivation of those who do. Maybe a flight to a country that you were thinking of visiting.

The problem with this proposal is that mass-market, Madison-Avenue-style ads have never been very successful on the short-attention-span, increasingly small-screen internet. Or it seemed to follow you around wherever you went.

A shift came from most publishers being careful with nicely designed sites, stricter rules around permitted ads, and minimal invasions of reading space.

Furthermore, an expectation of getting something for nothing proliferated with casual piracy. Since launching on September 16, Purify’s $3.99 app has made $150,000. Publishers signed up with ad networks to run ads in a bid to monetise their work.

Subscriptions remain viable in some areas.

And in an article in The Wall Street Journal, Murphy admits he is taking money from Eyeo to automatically whitelist a number of sites.

Why are ad blockers being used?

Lee Henshaw, managing director of Silence Media, the company behind Primo, a programmatic marketplace offering accountability to brands looking to engage their customers with high-impact online campaigns, recognises the challenges to publishers and agrees: “The popularity of ad blocking is a reaction to our industry’s current poor creative standards due to its lust for tracking”.

It has been hard to escape news about ad blocking over the past couple of weeks, after Apple’s iOS 9 software was released, allowing ad blocking on iPhones for the first time.

Apple allowed ad blockers with its iOS 9. It’s that simple. The right messaging to those using ad blockers, he added, “may be the occasion to talk honestly about the economics of the business”.

Today, content providers, such as TechRepublic, rely on revenue from advertisers.

If you’ve downloaded Crystal, what do you think about this new development? “It feels like you should probably make your ads better, and I would only do that only after I’d exhausted other avenues”.

New York-based startup Secret Media, for example, says it’s now working with 10 publishers in the U.S.to help them deliver video ads in a way that can not be detected by ad-blocking tools. Stripping away the ads means you’re breaking an unspoken covenant with the company giving you the videos, articles and social media updates.

Without those tools, it’s more hard to know what your audience enjoys, and what they want more of.

What is ad-blocking software? It’s impossible right now to predict which will roll down and gain the momentum of an avalanche, but a few things are likely to happen. One question that’s not answered in the FAQ: does Google still get the same cut of the revenue as it would if an advertiser bought the sapce? Facebook saw one billion people on its site in a single day recently.

That’s what Google Contributor lets you do.

“Many people already receive our journalism for free online, with digital advertising paying only a portion of the cost”, a Post spokesperson was quoted as saying. But the reality is making things and putting them onto a quality site costs money.

·A lot has been written about this over the past week, but it’s just the latest version of the love-hate relationship people and businesses have long had with ads, whether in print, on TV and now on the internet. (We hate you if you have fiber, really.) On a desktop, you barely notice the ads are gone, because the ads weren’t laying on top of the content. They were typically around the content. So relax, publishers. Ad blockers won’t destroy you tomorrow. And here too, I’m optimistic that there will be a renaissance in creativity and innovation once everyone fully understands the channel and learns to marry it to good old-fashioned storytelling.

Apple issued default refunds to all purchasers.

Publishers are naturally dismayed by this trend and are fighting back. Simply install the ad blocker and it will block content and ads.

The first ad blocker I recall was for an early online service called Prodigy, which was created to compete with CompuServe in the 1980s. It’s turned that around to ensuring it is an absolute powerhouse of the web.

Google wants to be proud of their legacy, and tricking people into clicking ads and selling our profiles to advertisers is an awesome business – but a terrible legacy for Larry and Sergey.