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.]
