Not necessarily. But ultimately right now the level of mobile ad blocking is very low. This will make a real difference to that - regardless as to whether it's new or innovative.
Ad blockers are going to gradually become irrelevant (like pop-up blockers) primarily because of the mobile web.
I believe the adoption of the mobile web is forcing advertisers to reconsider their strategies. With the limited screen real-estate and cut-throat competition for those pixels it becomes difficult for the marketers to go overboard.
Maybe, but consider it as one of many possible solutions we could have for the 'ad-blocking problem'. It's not really clear which solutions will take hold, but this is ideal for those that block ads for privacy and intrusiveness reasons.
Its an experiment. This may fail, but bits and pieces of it will be built into future solutions.
Until they make a serious attempt at it, how will they know what holds back adoption or what problems they will encounter?
I mean that it is not widely used. There are solutions for ad blocking on mobile. But while it is quite widespread on desktops, the rate of adaption on phones is still relatively small.
I've wondered this myself - what happens when ad blocking technology becomes integrated into mobile devices, or the general public starts to use it because the newest, shiniest browser now bundles it by default?
Just wow. I have used Adblock on desktop before and didn't realize how much difference it does on mobile. On desktop it just removes clutter but on mobile it truly changes the whole browsing experience. This will be huge. Almost none of my non-techie friends use Adblock on desktop but everyone will be using an iOS blocker. This will hurt sites big time, and I feel sorry for sites that weren't using the big bad ad networks but still get blocked (whether that happens I'm not sure). The question is -- is it too late to go back and make advertising "right" now? Will sites that use non-intrusive and non-tracking ads be just as blocked as those who do, or does these blockers give no incentive to improve, only to circumvent?
I thought they were just adding the functionality to block ads but they weren't creating a filter list. So I would assume adoption would be similar to how it is now, but with the actual blocking being much more performant for users who add filter lists.
You can see indirect evidence for this by looking at the exponential rise in ad-blocker-blocking efforts from a wide array of sites. 'Hi, we see you're using an ad blocker. Please turn it off.' That literally did not exist several years ago, even though ad blocking has been around for decades. Companies in recent years are getting aggressively desperate as the web becomes increasingly user friendly. At the same time, mobile is still dominated by an OS developed by the the world's largest ad delivery corporation - and it behaves accordingly.
That's a good point. I do think the push to get users on mobile has a good deal to do with the difficulty of blocking ads on mobile. Maybe that's where we're headed. Instead of making adblockers illegal users will be herded into locked down platforms that don't allow adblockers.
The barrier to entry to installing a mobile ad blocker (and then dealing with managing whitelists when shit doesn't appear correctly) is a lot higher than an ad blocker on desktop. I think that has a lot to do with the disconnect.
I also think that mobile ad blocking was something the industry feared -- and that the more in-touch tech community cared about -- but regular users simply don't think about as much. That said -- if mobile ads continue to get worse and if the process of managing a whitelist/using a mobile ad blocker can get easier, then maybe this will switch again.
The worst part of this to me -- and I say this as someone who makes my income basically b/c I'm a journalist who works for a publication who relies on advertising -- is that if the ad industry sees this as being much ado about nothing, the ad industry won't actually start trying to force better ad practices/blacklisting awful ad exchanges. And then we all lose.
The conclusion of the article is questionable, it seems more likely that ad blocking is about to become ineffective. Everything is moving to mobile, where Google/Apple have much more control of the platform and make it difficult or impossible to install ad blockers, particularly those that block ads in apps.
Second even where solutions to app ads exist (AdAway on Android) they are ineffective on in-stream advertising, which seems to be coming to dominate. There doesn't seem to be a way to block Twitter's promoted tweets in the Twitter app for example.
Well it'll be one of those things that every single tech website will run 100s of articles about, become a standard in the list of 'things to do when you get your new iPhone', 'apps to install on your new iPhone', 'things you didn't know your iPhone could do', something colleagues will ask each other over lunch 'hey did you try the new adblocker on your iPhone? It's a world of difference' etc. I think it'll get pretty big quickly.
But I agree, there's no real network effect going on, none of the major browsers will integrate it.
I think the early apps that allowed you to e.g. turn on your camera's light as a flashlight, early calculators etc are probably indicative of how popular these adblockers may get, but those were still pretty damn ubiquitous, not Whatsapp level growth but if you add up all the different apps that did this... it's up there. And we shouldn't underestimate the power of a better internet experience, I still remember when I first got Firefox and then later Chrome, looking back IE was just insanely bad and those two browsers ate up a ton of market share really quickly without any real network effects (although Chrome obviously had a lot of power behind it and even Firefox was marketed pretty aggressively).
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