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APPLE TENDS NOT to launch new products unless it is confident they will succeed.
That is why the news and media publishing industry is so terrified of the coming update to the Safari web browser on iPhone, which will reportedly contain an adblock option for users.
Safari is roughly 25% of all internet browsers and the nightmare scenario for website owners would be if all those users discovered just how much better and faster the web is once you block all the ads.
With iPhone and Apple users suddenly not seeing ads, many publishers could go out of business.
Billions in revenue depend on the speed at which content loads when users click on it. About 144 million people use Adblock, and 41% of users aged 18 to 29 have tried it. Those users have wiped about 10% off Google’s revenues, or $6 billion.
But publishers are not without weapons to fight Apple or other adblock software, like Adblock Plus.
Enter PageFair
One of those weapons is PageFair, a Dublin-based anti-adblock startup that provides publishers with technology that measures and defeats adblockers.
The company has 12 employees and about $1 million (€915,000) in venture capital investment funding.
It originally started in 2012 as an adblock analytics company, helping publishers understand how much money they were losing whenever readers showed up with adblock software on their browsers.
But as time went by, it became clear that publishers needed more than just information about how much money they were losing. They needed tools to defeat people using software that essentially prevents their web sites from fully loading.
“The typical person who installs Adblock now isn’t a geek using Firefox, it’s someone who is 18-19 years old and sitting in class, and is told by a friend to Google ‘Adblock’ and install it, it’s great,” CEO Sean Blanchfield told Business Insider.
They’re installing it because they watch a lot of YouTube and they get annoyed with these unskippable 40-second pre-roll ads in front of 30 seconds of content.”
No cookies for Apple
Blanchfield says he noticed last year that Apple begun sending signals that it wasn’t interested in helping ad tech firms track users and serve them ads.
“In July last year we noticed a company called Disconnect, they are an extension, much like Adblock, for Chrome. A San Francisco company. Their focus is privacy, user privacy and behavioural tracking.
“People install them basically to block cookies. As a side-effect they have to block most ads, because most ads use cookies.
“In any case, in July last year they launched mobile versions on Android and on iOS, and they weren’t approved for the Play Store, Google blocked them.
But Apple put them through (into the App Store). And I spoke to them after, and they felt pretty confident that they had been given the approval to proceed essentially blocking ads. That’s not their core mission but it’s an essential piece.”
PageFair’s solution is to scrambles the ads and deliver them in a way that adblock software can’t “see”.
“So a programme like Adblock Plus can’t recognise it,” Blanchfield said.
Bypassing Safari’s ad block preferences
And will this work even against Apple’s new preference option for Safari? ”Yes.”
But doesn’t it slow down speed at which a page loads ads? ”No, it’s still instantaneous.”
What we do is asynchronous, the page loads anyway, we detect when the usual advertising has failed to load, and only then do we go off and recover it. It takes milliseconds. And we don’t block the loading of the page.”
The product will be deployed with launch clients in the next few months.
Blanchfield says web clients are very, very interested. The company has revenue run-rate of roughly $1 million annually right now, but Blanchfield says it’s growing rapidly and will be a large multiple of that by the end of the year. It even opened an office in New York recently.
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All we need now is someone to come up with software that blocks them from blocking us from blocking ads.
Exactly Dylan. They’re wasting their time. But if a company wants to pay them for this software, good luck to them.
Go onto RTE Player and you will notice nothing will play while Adblock is Enabled. there is already ways to stop people from blocking ads.
In matters like these, where’s there’s a will, there’s a way and the will is particularly strong on this issue.
And there will always be ways to block the unblocker.
Damn, you robbed my idea.
Seven Minute Abs!
“When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.”
Fake Avast…. of all the websites that you can block Ads on. RTE think it’s okay to block content just because people use Adblock, even if they have already paid the TV License.
The internet advertising industry is slowly killing the enjoyment and the ease of using the internet. Added to annoying ads playing in the background, and all other ads i have these redirects nearly every time i use my phone. Its stops the function im doing and opens google store to some stupid game or app i have zero interest in. Everybody should have a choice whether or not to block ads. There are more than enough numbskulls out there who soak up advertising to leave the rest of us who dont wish to become braindead watching stupid ads which we have no interest in, in peace
@DH
Those ‘numbskulls’ are paying for you to enjoy all the free content that you currently enjoy.
If there was no advertising then it wouldn’t be feasible for sites like The Journal to exist. On a list of things that bother me in life, Internet advertising is way down the list towards the bottom.
Go ahead, let everyone block all the ads on all the sites, then you’d have nothing to read!
The issue isn’t the non intrusive ads. Look at this page most people will see 2 or 3 ads, but there’s no popup or redirect or auto play video that you can’t skip. Ads like the ones here I have no issue with but no one should be forced to watch something or be automatically forwarded to somewhere when they don’t want to be.
miguel i understand the need for it but i dont need it flashing constantly in front of my eyes every time i look something up. Constantly redirecting to other web sites is also a bit invasive. And the journal i have to say is not intrusive or annoying with ads. It happens to be fairly discreet compared to other sites. My complaint is not against advertising as a whole….and as for the numbskulls they are not paying anything more than i am unless of course they get brainwashed into parting with their money by the advertising to which i say thanks
I don’t mind ads that are unobtrusive and for products I might actually buy or be interested in…
What’s annoying is when the ad loads up instantly and I’m sat staring at an ad for some
scam weight loss product, fake antivirus or money making scheme while the actual content takes 120 seconds to load and when it finally does… Another pop up add for the same opens in front that has to be closed.
clicks x
“WAIT! Click ‘continue’ now for even better offers!”
clicks x
“Are you sure you want to leave this page?”
-.-
Just out of interest what is the exact address of this company gonna be?
Unit D, Mount Pleasant Business Park, Dublin 6, Ireland………….
Losing battle. The Adblockers will find another way and this will become redundant. The real way to win this war for content producers is to change how they deliver ads. Make them unobtrusive and people won’t bother to block them.
There’s also https://www.ublock.org/ which is far better than adblock.
As soon as I can block these a**holes I will! Adblock rocks!
I love the fact that this article is basically advising the uninitiated that there is applications you can download to block visual eyesores on a website!
*are!
Safari is terrible, shocking browser, google chrome is the no.1 app on itunes , says it all.
Also people will moan when you end up paying subs for YouTube Facebook and even this site etc. over blocking a few ads
The problem isn’t a “few” ads though, I got rid of Sky TV because it was becoming more ads than content and it’s only because of the ad blockers that we still have a viable internet. The way things are going with the government wanting to block anything they see fit and unwanted ads being forced through it doesn’t bode well.
I work in IT and I have never used an Ad blocker. Sites I commonly use don’t go overboard with the ads.
The biggest offender I have found with ads is the rte player, I just don’t brother anymore with it.
I do watch a lot of user created content on youtube so the ad revenue partly goes to them and I tolerate them a tad because of that but a ton of stuff is free online because of ads.
The mundanity of evil eh
I don’t use Adblock on any of the sites I use regularly although I do use it on the journal as a punishment for their weird habit of deleting innocent comments.
Sometimes thx to the ads that we are able to use free app.. The most annoying things are pop ups for me!!
Not sure where you are getting the Safari 25% from. W3 seems to disagree
http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php
It’s listed Safari at 16.2% market share.
The RTE News Now is the greatest pain in the Ar$e for pop up ads
Screw these guys for making the world a more miserable place.
sçūmbægs
God forbid websites actually make some money to continue providing content for free
There are quite a few articles, calling ad blockers thieves, I use adblock because I would never click on a pop up ad, or an ad or banner… There is a great article on a block.org explaining the opposing side to this article, it also gives links to other articles with different views on it. I shop online so how much money do they want from me, every cent? Two words I’d love to share with them come to mind.
So they are trying to make popups that no one will be able to block. Can’t wait until scam artists use their technique to hack people who will not be able to stop the code execution. Seems like an idea that will ultimately lead to hurting lots of people once whatever technique it is they use goes public.
hosts.zip
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