Among other things during his radio program, Mac, iPhone, and iPad user Rush Limbaugh on Monday discussed Apple’s iOS 9 for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, specifically content- or ad-blockers and what he thinks is Apple’s reasoning and what will result.
The 3-hour Rush Limbaugh Show, the highest-rated, most-listened-to talk-radio program in the United States with some 15 million weekly listeners, airs daily on a network of approximately 590 AM and FM affiliate radio stations. The program is also broadcast worldwide on the U.S. Armed Forces Radio Network.
From the live on-air transcript:
…Folks, look, on an iPhone, particularly a smartphone, when you have a website that takes 45 seconds to load everything, I mean, things you don’t even see being loaded, the trackers you don’t see. You see the video player being loaded, you see the ads being loaded, but there’s much, much more. All the trackers and the analytics from Google that are being loaded on these websites, you never see it, but it’s why your bar never finishes for 45. You can read what’s on the website maybe within 20 seconds, but your battery is churning for that full minute while all this stuff is loaded. And sometimes the content doesn’t load fully until all these things do.
And then you’re shown how you can have every website you visit load in 10 seconds? What are you gonna do? So the genie is out of the bottle… White listing is not gonna solve the problem. The genie’s out of the bottle. So what’s gonna happen, this guy is exactly right, the consumer is gonna determine what happens here, and the advertisers, Madison Avenue is not just gonna sit there and say, “Oops, we have been snookered.” What’s gonna happen is there are gonna be all kinds of creativity. We’ve already led the way here in radio years ago on this. We are truly the trailblazers. What’s gonna happen next online is advertising is not gonna look like advertising. And it’s not gonna have pictures. It’s gonna present to you as a news story.
Creative writers are gonna write stories about a product or that you’re gonna think is a review or maybe somebody really recommending, when in fact it’s gonna be an ad. And it can’t be blocked because traditional blockers haven’t yet been written to block that kind. Or they’ll come up with some way of disguising what looks like content as an ad, in order to get past the blockers. I mean, too many people are depending on this revenue, too many websites.
I would have to say the top reason that Apple is doing this, and this is my wild guess based on things that I’ve studied and read. Steve Jobs, before he died, declared back in the days when Apple only — I say only. Their cash reserve was $40 billion. Now they’re over $200 billion. Back when they had $40 billion — and it was still more than anybody else had — Jobs said he would spend all of it to destroy Google. He said he was ready for thermonuclear war. The reason was Android, he believed, was stolen from iOS. Eric Schmidt used to be on the Apple board. He was on the Apple board when the iPhone first came out in 2007. If you look at Google’s Android phones around then they were clunkers. They had keyboards, hard button keyboards on them. They were nothing like what the iPhone is or any other smartphone today.
Shortly after that Google announces they’re totally redoing their phones and Android phones begin to look just like iPhones, as Samsung’s did, and Jobs was not mad at Samsung — well he was, but the focus of his anger was Google. Well, Google’s primary source of revenue is advertising sales all over the Internet. And the best way, the fastest way to launch an attack on Google is content blockers, ad blockers on Apple because the percentage of iOS users in the developed world, with customers that spend money, is an overwhelming percentage using Apple’s iOS. So if Google sees a severe decline in revenue from iOS devices, iPhones, iPads, and all that, it would be a huge chunk out of their revenue stream. I think that’s among whatever other reasons there are for this, that’s one of the big ones.
…This is a direct assault on the income streams of a lot of people. Internet service providers and website operators are kind of operating at a — I don’t know if you call it a disadvantage or not, but the Internet, from its earliest days, content was free. And it became expected that everything on the Internet is free, including streamed video, music, textual content, whatever it is, it’s supposed to be free. It’s always been free… So they’ve got big problems. Content blockers coming along and attacking the only revenue source they’ve really been able to depend on is gonna cause major upheavals. And as I say, the way it’s gonna manifest itself is these advertisers and their agencies are gonna try to come up new ways to have their advertising presented to you, disguised as news stories or, who knows, contests, promotions, you name it. But whoever comes up with the most creative way of getting around the blockers is gonna get rich. It’s the way it always happens in America, while America’s still America, so act fast.
Full transcript here.
MacDailyNews Take: We are longtime Mac users. We relish change.
And we’re not going anywhere.
Currently, the Top Paid iPhone Apps include the following content blockers:
1. Crystal $0.99
4. Purify Blocker $3.99
39. Blockr $0.99The Top Paid iPad apps include the following content blockers:
2. Crystal $0.99
7. Purify Blocker $3.99
74. Blockr $0.99Let us know which one you like best!
SEE ALSO:
iOS 9 adblocker apps top App Store charts; developer pulls ‘Peace’ adblocker – September 18, 2015
iOS 9 content blocking will transform the mobile Web – August 24, 2015
Apple’s iOS 9 ad blocking threatens Google’s lifeblood – August 14, 2015
Apple News shows that Apple wants to bolster and profit from ads, not eliminate them – July 10, 2015
Rush Limbaugh on his new Apple Watch: Really cool, pretty slow, and Siri is now pretty much flawless – May 5, 2015
Rush Limbaugh: ‘Nine out of 10 tech bloggers hate Apple’ – August 5, 2013
Rush Limbaugh: ‘High-tech lynching: Senate attempts to crucify Apple’ – May 21, 2013
Rush Limbaugh: Apple products create jobs in America – October 18, 2012
[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]
Or maybe Apple really just wants us to have a better experience.
How are ads disguised as or mixed into the stream of articles a “better experience?” At least the ads now are marked as and clearly identifiable as ads. Be careful what you wish for, ad-blockers, it might be worse.
EXACTLY!
This “article” is just a thinly veiled advertisement for the Rush Limbo Quaalude Hour, we can see some click whores are going to learn from him, now that he is broadcasting his technique
Sounds like another open-minded, tolerant liberal regurgitating.
Just installed my ad blocker and I love it. Was thinking of whitelisting MDN but why bother. I’d rather just pay for ad free content, please give me a subscription option!
I am willing to take a chance on that, Regular Reader. When there is a blocker, I will use it.
The better experience is less loading time.
But if you need the ads you don’t need to use a blocker.
He’s so cute…
As long as they don’t block the shady online Mexican pharmacy that Rush gets his Oxycontin from, he should be fine.
Love how the “tolerant left” loves to bring up the addiction to pain killers that Rush suffered from due to his surgery. I had a good friend who was also addicted to pain killers, it’s almost 100% addiction rate for some kinds of pain killers.
If you don’t like his politics, fine, that’s no excuse to be a complete cretin.
Leftists don’t have to be tolerant, they’re always right – even when they’re wrong. Leftists have made cognitive dissonance they’re motto.
The “tolerant left” hates hypocrisy. When Lush quits bashing those whose addiction takes over their lives, then, perhaps the t-l might back off.
In reality, I think the t-l is pretty pissed off Lush did not go to jail like any other addict of “color”. (Yes, it is usually about race).
I’ll buy any Adblocker that blocks that bloviating ass Limbaugh.
So sad to come here and see this crap. Glad I’m Adblocking MDN also.
This ain’t about Limbaugh. Try and put a muzzle on your small minded biases and look at the bigger picture & issue.
There are other sources for opinions other than Limbaugh. And if he’s paying MDN for ads, then I shall gladly block ads from MDN. A bad clock can be right twice a day- I’m sick of seeing this repulsive jackass shoved in my face.
I don’t know how that’s possible. I NEVER see him on anything these days lret alone be sick of it. His importance has diminished. His was always just a show that had to have it’s controversies for ratings purposes.
Terribly ignorant and short sighted of you, but at least you wear your bigotry on your sleeve.
Actually, Rush is just showing here how one gets advertising disguised as content? 😀
Rush is postulating one very possible consequence of ad blockers. Advertisers already work to have their product discussed on editorial content, so that is not new. The difference has been that pre-web publishers had the ability to separate content from advertising because there was symbiotic relationship between advertisers and publishers. Publishers produced content that attracted a particular demographic of readers/consumers, and advertisers paid all the costs of publishing because they wanted to reach this curated group of people with communications about their company and products via advertisements. The consumer is the third leg of this symbiotic relationship. Pre-web, consumers were provided with entertaining or informational content that cost them nothing or very little other accepting that the content on the printed pages of their favorite mags or newspapers shared space with passive ads. Radio and TV used interruptive advertising, but it came in predictable intervals. Bottom is that advertisers have ALWAYS paid the freight for content, except the relatively rare and costly advertising-free subscriptions.
As Rush points out, the internet is a disruption. The consumer leg of the symbiotic relationship has been ripped out through the expectation that everything on the internet should be free. Ad blockers are the beginning of a range war like scenario and you can bet there will be some major shakeout, because when advertisers can’t be assured that the eyes of site visitor are exposed to their messages, there will be no money to pay the cost of running a website and producing good content. And there was a time when consumers understood that advertisers were sponsors, and they knew that “Sponsor” was paying for most of what they were enjoying.
I doubt that there will be “hidden” ads in content because people sniff that sort of stuff out pretty quick, and that content soon becomes derided, ignored, or both.
The problem with web advertising is that the internet swamped traditional publishing. These organizations understood the symbiosis. Understood that all parties had to be happy with the arrangement and with the balance of content to ads. But they were blindsided by the internet and simply didn’t know how to move their expertise to the digital realm. This left a vacuum for a lot of bright technical people to develop a lot new methods of delivering and analyzing and new breed of advertising. And with most publishers on the web new to the “business” and strapped for some sort of income from their endeavors, they jumped all over these new digital ad types and methods. It looks good on paper. But as we’ve all seen, it’s a horrible experience. Ads popping out. Ads interrupting reading or covering up a video you’re watching. Rollovers that blast unexpected sound. And the the increasing load times, which are no longer just a nuisance, they cost us money in cell time while on our mobiles.
Three things have to happen, IMO, for some sanity.
1. Consumers have to accept that there are no free lunches. The advertisers are not the enemy. It is a FACT that most new business comes from people seeing ads, and finding a product or service that is useful to them. Advertisers are willing to pay for your favorite content if you will simply share some of your attention span. It’s a fair trade.
2. Content producers are not the enemy either. It takes time, talent, effort and money to produce a quality website. But they have to align and produce some advertising standards that are respectful to all three legs of this symbiotic relationship. This means they have to have an outside auditing agency to independently gauge and publish their site’s traffic, behavior, and demographics, so they can sell advertising space at a fair and sustainable rate. A fair price for their space enables them to cut back on the number of ads and all the gimmicks that get in our faces.
3. Advertisers need to reward good content with higher ad rates. They need to return to quality of the advertising message rather than the quantity of impressions. Produce web ads that convey information rather a tease to induce a click. Today’s web advertising is like strip mining.
If anyone wants to see this happen let me know.
Please excuse the typos. The above was kind of stream of consciousness dump, and I hit enter before re-reading it.
Our kingdom for an EDIT button eh?
Exactly. Remember when I mentioned something about “quality websites?” Those have Edit buttons.
How about edit buttons in our HEADS that stop us from posting things we wind up being ashamed of? gee, either proofread your own posts or LET IT GO so everyone knows you don’t care about what people think of you,
what do you think POST COMMENT means, gee, let me think about it for a minute?
no, it means this is what i want to post.
this button separates the half thoughts from the fully baked commentary in a clear way, the people who are half baked wind up apologizing for what? not reading their post until it is up in lights?
oh well,
We’re all human and make mistakes. Perfection you’ll never find, even in yourself. It’s just nice to be able to correct things we missed. I’ve post read my comments many times and missed simple mistakes before. It’s just irritating having no recourse as is available almost everywhere else. Not worth getting your panties in a bunch over.
“We’re all human and make mistakes” does not work with troll logic, which works to destroy any apparent weakness merely in order to score points..
I’m with you Spark.
Edit buttons – This is all ironic.
Ad blocking for the most of us, is not about getting something for free, but improving our web browsing experience. The web is kind of trashy, and wouldn’t mind seeing some decent honest ads.
how come none of them work on the iPad 2 ?
My understanding is the content blocking feature in iOS 9 requires a 64 bit chip.
The first devices with an A7 (first 64 bit chip) were the iPhone 5S, iPad Air, and iPad Mini 2.
I have a few old iPads that don’t get this feature either. 🙁
Thanks Vatdoro,
I won’t take it personally any more !-)
Sorry to hear there are others in my boat, tho the company will be short lived, i gotta getta 64 bit iPad!
Rush’s website took 1 second to load. Heh. HEH HEH!
Simply put, all the crap we don’t want is coming from multiple places. It’s horrible. It not only slows our individual experiences down, but it slows the Internet down in general.
In addition, the websites allowing all of the crap to flow through to you also allow malicious software to get through to you on occasion. Cuts way down on fake FLASH installs, etc.
My prediction is that the web will get better. Those sites that provide a valuable service will evolve. Some will charge the end user directly. Some will bring ads in, reformat them, and then push them out as part of the site. Madison Avenue will just have to count on the site for analytics.
I’ve always said I’d pay for Macdailynews directly.
@TM
YOU THE MAN!
And it’s funny since this site is the most egregious of all the websites with ads in my experience. Especially the ads that come from tracking. I wouldn’t mind subscribing either to stop the ad-buse.
MDN has to stop the troll bots and those not signed in from posting. This site has gotten soooooo bad it’s ridiculous. I don’t visit very often and I’ve been around for many years.
Disable Javascript in your browser and a lot of it will go away on top of the other methods of blocking ads. I end up turning it on and off for various reasons depending on my mood.
Great tip, thanks!
The problem with this is that a lot of valuable web applications rely on javascript. Killing javascript breaks a lot of things besides ad delivery.
I only use it on this site. Most sites don’t need as much in the way of deflector shields removing all of the ugly detritus, the regular methods are fine. It solved the problem of all of the overkill whitelisting requests here. It’s not a perfect solution.
You mean the troll bots who deliver a large number of downvotes to any comments favourable to Apple? That never used to happen before WodPress implemented the star voting system, making it easy for fragtards to disrupt the conversation in the same way that spitball artists do in middle school classrooms. Time to bring back the switch and the dunce cap, I say
Hang in there hawk, this is a concertd effort to silence all positive Apple feedback, sentiment and comments by google samscum and others that have been disrupted and are shit scraed.
Don’t oblige by running away.
Nothing like guys in underwear on your screen.
#unwanted-ads
Peace…. Yeah… iGotIT Eric T. MOLE! Suck onIT .I. POCK FACED FCKR You are lower than the whaleShit @ the bottom of the ocean.
Apps are already the young people’s “Internet” rather than Safari or IE or Firefox. This has already happened with the younger crowd.
Content will increasingly be something you pick because you like the subject matter and download ‘that app.’ Yup, it will have some ads to support it, but it will be limited to what users will put up with.
ADs have gotten WAY OUT OF HAND! Filling every crevice on the page… so this is great user friendly progress and much needed. I will WHITELIST any/all the sites I care about (like this one) but will be FREE as a bird while exploring others!
I don’t mind UNOBTRUSIVE advertising. If I see something of interest, something new, then I like to know about and otherwise I’d miss it.
What I do mind or pop-ups, new tabs, App Store launches and video ad delays.
I like ‘free’ internet pages ‘sites’ and hope this doesn’t ruin that. Many more news sites are building paywalls or limiting access, and I generally don’t pay – maybe two news sites I pay for and just opt out for Next for the rest of it.
Nothing more obtrusive than that BIG FAT IDIOT being ass-kissed by MDN in front of my face. I am too nauseated and distracted to read anything further here- happens every time.
Jeez, could you get over yourself? It’s an article about a technology topic. If you stay stuck on personalities, you’ll always be as stupid as you are presently. If you don’t like it, troll another page. Damn!
auramac, you must realise that the fellows behind MDN, as serious AAPL investors, appreciate Rush Limbaugh’s market reach and Apple advocacy probably more than his politics and personality. His remarks about Apple’s products and philosophy influence millions more than do the meretricious “analysts” subservient to Wall Street covens. I mean, really, you need to see the bright side of it all.
I agree but there’s far more than what you see. The tracking cookies and analytic data are the hidden little gems. You never see them and they serve no purpose to you and your page visit. My page was fully loaded and the progress bar was only halfway across the screen. I loaded an ad-blocker today and my pages are loading in seconds now – no progress bar.
IMHO, the advertisers did this to themselves. They weren’t content with just banner ads, like what you would get while, say, reading a newspaper. They had to do pop-ups, pop-unders, scripts, tracking, etc. to get their clicks. They weren’t satisfied with advertising to you, they wanted to trick you into clicking, and load your browser with all kinds of crap and malware. It was a war on the user experience they started which caused the first adblockers to be created for web browsers. This is just another stage in the war.
Dear Ad-blockers,
What’s coming will work better for everyone.
Three ads per article, no tracking.
That’s a reasonable compromise.
I just installed WebGuard from the Apple App store on my iMac. I love surfing the web again with all ads blocked. You should see the MacDailyNews homepage with all ads blocked. Quite refreshing! I love it!
I always get a chuckle when I see MDN’s mandatory paragraph about Rush Limbaugh being the number one radio show in America. This is like saying Led Zeppelin is number one vinyl record of 2015. While true, it doesn’t exactly say what MDN is trying (or hoping) to say….
My grandfather used to love talk radio. My father, not so much. Among my colleagues at work or friends, I can’t think of anyone willing to admit that they listen to radio (talk or otherwise). They all have this device called a smartphone (in most cases, iPhone) and they get most of their news and entertainment from that. And it doesn’t have (or need) a radio.
Old people long for old technologies. I know a few people nostalgic for the “warm glow” of a tube tv, or the physical portability of audio cassette tape. They are the kind that misses their radio on their phone. The real thing, not the streaming app…
Personally, I wish Apple would create their own search engine.
Content worth viewing/listening is worth paying for and I prefer subscriptions to advertising. I doubt that I am alone in this preference.
I use adblockers and VPN to give the data miners a harder time and keep some of that shit off of my screen and apologize not for it.
As to Rush, his contract is up January 1 and his show will end then if not before. His demographics and toxic talk have created a shrinking ice cube and it all started with Sandra Fluke.
Here are his demos:
http://tinyurl.com/prkdraf
Old, white, rural and poor. Not exactly a prime advertising target unless you are selling gold, ammo, depends or Polident.
Nothing in there about white, rural and poor. Are you projecting?
Just describing what the data shows. Like most Republican voters, they are uninformed, parochial and not well educated.
Ghostery reports 14 trackers on every MDN page; in contrast my Yahoo news and stock home page has one.
When am I going to whitelist a page with 14 trackers? Never!