The Reckoning
For a while now, a storm has been brewing on the Web. For those in the content business, a major reckoning is about to occur.
There is just too much junk, and spam, on the web. Popular sites such as stackoverflow.com are often cloned, their content scraped and repackaged, replete with aggressive advertisements. As good as Google is at filtering out the bad seeds, it’s just not good enough. And their domains are easy to miss, making it all to easy to get stuck in an awful trap of pop-ups and lies. Without entirely disabling Javascript, there is often not much you can do.
Blogs and other media sites, as well as user-generated content portals, have a challenging business model of gaining eyeballs with free content, and making money by showing the users ads. Larger, established organizations, who have less threat of competition, can institute a paywall. Neither of these are good user experiences. Paywalls reduce the spread of information, and don’t always match up to a user’s perceived value. Ads are, generally, annoying.
Additionally, ads are becoming more invasive and disrespectful of a user’s privacy. Searching for something on Amazon, only to be presented with ads for that item on an entirely different site, would have been seen as the moniker of a dystopian future just a few years ago. Yet it is entirely commonplace. While there are certainly times when a targeted advertisement is helpful, most often, by its nature, it is not.
Browsers, and major players, have made small strides in giving a user control over these ads, but the solutions are cumbersome. Pop-up blockers are now standard fare, though a new breed of Javascript and CSS based “pop-ups” are becoming prevalent. Third parties have done a better job of giving back control, but their soutions are sub-optimal and, often, downright user hostile. By using a browser extension, ads can often be hidden, but the ads still take up bandwidth, and the filtering process often results in a greater use of system resources (CPU cycles and RAM) than the original page!
It is obvious that a solution — one that puts the user first — is due. Apple will introduce the basic workings of just such a solution in iOS 9, called Safari Content Blocking. While this is not an ad-blocker in its own right, it is the tool to create one. In fact, with the right settings, an app can tell Safari to block ads, tracking scripts, and even entire sites. Better yet, these sites can be prevented from even loading, so less resources are used. (Check out the WebKit blog post.)
Advertisements and spammy content has become too intrusive, annoying, and aggressive. While it could be argued that Apple may have implemented this system, not so much for its users, as it did to give a blow to the ad-dependent competition, it’s still a win for everyone. Except the ad networks.
And the sites that serve spammy ads are going to have to figure something out, aren't they? What do you think is the right solution? Let me know on Twitter.
