“For iOS 9 Apple introduced a couple of new technologies related to its Safari web browser. The first is the ability of developers to write extensions for Safari that would be approved by Apple and distributed through the App Store,” Mark Hibben writes for Seeking Alpha. “The second is the ability to write a content blocking extension for Safari.”
“An article in AppleInsider pointed out that web publishers stand to lose over $20 billion in advertising revenue this year, and almost double that in 2016, presumably due to the impact of iOS 9,” Hibben writes. “Marco Arment posted a blog piece predicting the demise of the web advertising business model: ‘Web publishers had things pretty nice for a while. Those days are over. It won’t be easy for many to move on, and not everyone will make it.'”
“The use of ad blockers will only accelerate a process that is already underway in Internet content delivery. This is a shift away from advertising supported content delivery (the general purpose web page, but also advertising supported video and music services), to subscription based content,” Hibben writes. “In the new subscription model, the general purpose web browser will tend to be less preferred as a means of access than custom created apps. Even though content delivery will still be Internet based, the user client will tend to be an app downloaded from an app store. This makes the accessing process more secure for the provider and will tend to reduce fraud and hacking.”
“If Apple’s iOS profitability is any indication, revenue and profits will be quickly drained out of the advertising supported tier of the Internet,” Hibben writes. “In the June quarter, Google made $3.6 billion (20% of total) in revenue from its Network category, which is mostly from partner sites’ display advertising. Losing a significant portion of this revenue could produce something most Google investors don’t anticipate: negative growth.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Somewhere there’s a happy medium in the land of free-to-visit websites, where the ads support the publishers’ operating costs (and even – gasp! – some profit) and actually work for the users (you find a good deal on an SSD drive, for example), yet don’t bombard the user with too many ads, etc. At MacDailyNews, we’re working diligently to get there (more info here) and we thank you for your support!
Hopefully, Apple’s tools can assist users in getting better experiences without harming their favorite sites and there is never anything even remotely close to the backlash a Jeffries analyst described in June “where certain sites are ‘not optimized for use with Safari.'”
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SEE ALSO:
Apple News is fast, responsive, enjoyable, and it might become your only news app – July 15, 2015
Apple News shows that Apple wants to bolster and profit from ads, not eliminate them – July 10, 2015
How Apple’s mobile ad-blocker could backfire on the company and iPhone, iPad users – June 12, 2015
Hats off to Web advertising – no, really – July 6, 2015
Apple’s support of mobile ad blocking may upend how the web works – June 12, 2015
iOS 9 lets app developers make ad blockers for Safari – June 10, 2015
