On LinkedIn, I read an interesting editorial piece about Apple’s encouragement of developers to enable ad-blocking for their mobile apps. It’s really quite worth the read, whether you’re an Android user or an iPhone user, content advertising takes up great amounts of space on our smaller devices, are often hard to dismiss, and if you’re zoomed in, might leave you stuck with no access to the option to close it. Annoying!
According to this article, Apple’s fight against enabling ad blocking from within content reading apps means “Publishers are screwed. – Google is really screwed. – Consumers win. – Apple really wins.”
I agree with all but the idea that consumers really win. You see, Apple hopes that this will move publishers to use their iDevice NEWS app, to make up for the loss in income from the advertising. Apple has found a new way to monetize, and this time, the focus is the news. So, the “Consumers win.” quote may depend on what kind of consumer one is. If a person really wants to read the news under this new model, they’d have to pay a fee to view the news in their app – perhaps a subscription fee (isn’t EVERYTHING going to monthly payments, nowadays?!)
As a person who reads The LA Times, what I’ve been stuck with is the option to pay a bundle of money every month to view just the online version, or pay a smaller amount each month, but be forced to receive a printed paper (at least I can just stick to Sunday) – but online viewing comes with that fee! The idea is – they want to ensure that I get those advertisements!
So, under Apple’s new model, a news consumer like me – one who doesn’t want to pay a subscription to read additional content, I wouldn’t be happy paying through iTunes to read a paper with no ads. I’ll deal with the ads, so I can occasionally read a variety of news sources and periodicals – if I can deal with those ads for free.
What do you think? Would you rather pay a subscription to view your periodical and news content online, or would you rather dismiss ads for free?
The editorial worth reading: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/apples-brilliant-assault-advertising-google-jason-calacanis