
Apple's "evil/genius" plan to punk the web and gild the iPad - tvon
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/06/apples-evil-genius-plan-to-punk-the-web-and-gild-the-ipad.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss
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ojbyrne
I suddenly reflected on the absurdity of

a. paying for hardware

b. paying for apps

c. paying for airtime

... in order to see ads.

~~~
ahoyhere
You pay for your car, your parking, your highway taxes, and your gas... only
to have your view of the roadside covered by billboards.

The alternative? Pay for your software, too. There's no reason it should be
free.

~~~
jpdbaugh
Agreed. I am so tired of this notion that software (and other things too) need
to be free and supported by ads. What the hell is wrong with with just paying
for something so that you don't have to get bombarded by psychological warfare
designed to cause you to purchase shit you don't need? I am worried that this
is direction the internet is going. Its starting to just be a huge system to
drive consumerism. Really though everything is being designed around designed
around better advertising. Even the holy grail of the internet, real time
search, is really just about better ads.

~~~
ahoyhere
Don't worry, it's cyclical. Don't remember the advertising crash of 2000/2001?
It was going the same way: banners will support everything! FREEEEEEE! Then
the bottom fell out of the banner market, because it trackable, very clear how
little the banners returned. Then those businesses all went out of business. A
year or two later we small-time "Average Joes" (eg. not customers of SAP) saw
the first true SaaS aimed at us.

The main reason Google ads worked so well for so long is because they are
topical and their format was new. Word on the vine is that the click-through
rates for most text ads is falling...

History repeats.

The prevailing popular opinion? Doesn't matter. Everybody's a poker player. A
BAD poker player. They say they won't pay, but they will. I'm sure if you told
people they could have free food, they would turn around and tell the next
restaurant that they wouldn't pay. But when they got hungry outside of the
free food hours, or they really felt like indian tonight instead of food
caplets, they would.

I think geeks, having a slightly better than average ability to get software
for free, BELIEVE their own poker-playing, but of course, they will also pay.
The proof is there.

------
philwelch
A company isn't like a single group of people, really. It's more like a
confederation of affiliated fiefdoms. Some companies are worse than others in
this regard (for instance, you can actually find pirated copies of Windows 7
by searching on Bing:
[http://www.bing.com/search?q=%2bpirate+windows+7&FORM=RC...](http://www.bing.com/search?q=%2bpirate+windows+7&FORM=RCRE))
but even Apple is somewhat affected.

In one office, one group of people working on Safari decided Readability was a
good idea worthy of reimplementation. In another office, possibly another
building, another group of people decided iAd would be a good idea. Any higher
ups, including Steve, probably agreed with both assessments without thinking
to put the two together, because they have far more important work to do than
designing absurd conspiracies to "punk the web and gild the iPad".

~~~
cobralibre
This is certainly true of many companies and may well be true of Apple, too,
though it doesn't really fit the prevailing narrative we have of Apple as a
company precisely steered by an extremely hands-on executive team.

Personally, I'm tickled by this silly and completely implausible variant of
the "corporation as federation" idea: That the the executive team is focused
on the iOS platform to such an extent that the desktop Safari team implemented
Reader -- "annoying ads" marketing and all -- simply to see if they could get
away with it.

~~~
philwelch
Why would it a matter of "if they could get away with it"? It's a genuinely
good feature.

What I am saying is that it's highly implausible that the executive team
deliberately set out to advantage iAds by reimplementing Readability in the
_Mac_ version of Safari. (If Mobile Safari had Reader--where it would be even
more useful--then some suspicion could be warranted.)

~~~
cobralibre
Bear in mind that you're responding to a bit of fanciful musing which was
explicitly signaled by the phrase "I'm tickled by this silly and completely
implausible... idea" -- the idea being that the Reader feature is a public
thumbing of the nose towards the iAds initiative, made possible by upper
management's ostensible neglect of Apple's desktop software.

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hinting
Yes, it's a grand conspiracy. The only other possible explanation would be:

1) Readability got popular. It's a good idea so they baked it into the
browser.

2) There is plenty of money in ads. Apple decided they wanted some of this
money instead of funneling it to a direct competitor.

I prefer the conspiracy idea myself.

~~~
ilovecomputers
Reading this Ken Fisher article was akin to reading a blog post.

This is why I look to authors like John Siracusa for quality articles on Ars
Technica. This article however, is just a giant assumption that is likely to
not be true.

------
chaosmachine
_"Reader mode seems to only be available on pages that the browser thinks are
articles"_

Someone will write a javascript workaround that stops "reader mode" from
triggering. If it's just a simple heuristic, it should be easy to defeat.

~~~
dangrover
I don't think you've actually used it. it doesn't just "trigger" and block
just ads from appearing. You still see the ads and everything on e page. On
certain pages, you can optionally, manually enter a mode that just brings the
text into focus.

~~~
mechanical_fish
This is a pretty important detail, because it means that only the most
obnoxious site designs will suffer. There are still _some_ ads. Indeed, the
remaining ad space might even grow in value, partially compensating for the
loss of the obnoxious follow-on pages.

Of course, that assumes a more intelligent metric for ad value than just the
raw number of page views. Which means that this whole thing could end up
_benefiting_ Google. Who has the analytics data to help put a value on ads
that is more intelligent than just "cost per thousand downloads of the ad,
even if those downloads are on page seven of a ten-'page' article"? I know
who!

------
rubinelli
How come Apple always pulls off stuff Microsoft would never get away with?

~~~
mechanical_fish
I'd reverse the question:

Why doesn't Firefox already do this out of the box? It's not as if adblocking
is a particularly new concept. This is ten-year-old technology. It's not as if
adblocking isn't known to be something people want: Geeks use it all the time.

~~~
blocke
There are still questions to the morality and legality of ad blocking in
respect to copyright law I'd imagine.

Personally I could give a crap. ;)

~~~
devinj
You could or you couldn't?

~~~
dtf
Aside from Apple vs Google, David Mitchell discusses this curious form of
expression with graphs and what-not:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw>

------
evo_9
To me this is more about Apple attacking back at Google. Jobs made a comment
about how it wasn't them (Apple) that entered their (Googles) market referring
to Googles entering the smartphone market.

Apple is attacking Google on two fronts - the Web, a move to hit Google in the
money belt via Reader and it's ad-blocking features; secondly, copying
Google's advertising monetization methods to reap potentially Google like (aka
huge) profits via iAd, and again limit/control Google/other advertising
platforms's on their iOS's.

I got to hand it to Apple, it's a pretty good strategy. I suspect they won't
suffer much backlash from this hypocrisy beyond the tech crowd though.

~~~
joe_the_user
It really doesn't matter who hit first. Apple and Google have different and
conflicting business models (and arguably views of the world). Their war is
inevitable. Both companies are in it for profit but that's not what I care
about.

I am Google partisan in the war simply because Google's model seems to imply
an open world whereas Apple's model seems to imply a closed world.

------
av500
Does anybody remember the time when articles on the web were mostly single
page (and you scrolled down to read them - hey mice even have scroll wheels
for that)? Then the ads people figured that they can cram in more ads by
splitting articles every 10 lines and reading them became totally annoying. If
Apple can force the content back to single page, I am all for it...

------
risotto
Nobody uses Safari and a fraction of this nobody uses Readability (however
apple brands it)

Chrome and Firefox have a plugin architecture and ad block.

Jailbreak you iPad and block iAds in /etc/hosts

Enjoy modern life and the Internet and gadgets.

~~~
blocke
Chrome and Firefox have a plugin architecture and don't have ad block built-in
as shipped. Huge difference there.

(On a sidenote I'm still using Firefox over Chrome as Firefox is still the
superior adblock platform. ;)

~~~
masklinn
> Chrome and Firefox have a plugin architecture and don't have ad block built-
> in as shipped. Huge difference there.

What difference? Safari 5 has a plugin architecture and doesn't have ad block
built-in as shipped.

------
kylemathews
Or in other words, Safari's reader is going to kill our page views and ad
click-through rates and we're mad about that because we're not getting rich on
Apple's app store like everyone else.

~~~
wmf
If Ars believes that there's more money to be made from the App Store than
from the Web, they're welcome to release an app.

~~~
blocke
So what is the point of the web if people have to get permission to publish
native apps to make money off their own content?

~~~
wmf
I agree that Apple is screwing things up, but I don't think Ars is complaining
out of self-interest.

~~~
blocke
Wasn't Ars the site that was whining at it's readers about how adblocking
screws them? It would fit in with their previous complaints.

~~~
loewenskind
How does blocking ads that I'm not going to click screw anyone? Surely no one
pays for their ads to just appear on a web page. If they do I think they're
getting ripped off. Until I started hearing people talk about how scary
targeted ads were I never even knew. I don't run ad block but I don't even
notice the ads. I had to consciously look to see if they were targeted. I saw
they were, said "oh, that's scary" and went back to my regular browsing. A
result of growing up on public TV I guess.

------
paulnelligan
Somehow I don't think the web will even miss a beat as a result of this.
Content will still live on, People will still use computers to browse. I'm
pretty sure I'll still be able to get news from my favourite sources, maybe
those people with iPads and iPhones will pay for this content for me by
watching ads. That's fine with me!

I had an iPhone which broke after 15 months, and have ordered an Android phone
and couldn't be happier about it. I really don't feel like I'm missing out on
anything.

------
tomlin
Article has some good points, but even my somewhat temperate view of Apple (I
find the type of devotion a little like Scientology, to be honest) doesn't
make me believe "Reader" is a nefarious scheme to overtake advertising --
although I am sure that wouldn't be looked down upon internally.

------
mambodog
I see this as a good thing for the web. Now websites (that are serving
articles) have to compete with the layout/presentation of Reader, both in
terms of having nice, readable typography and layout, and having appealing,
non-obnoxious ads, like some of the higher end of print ads.

------
protomyth
I saw this feature and thought of the built-in Universal Access on the Macs.
Going along those lines, a lot of pages have way too small text and this is a
more convenient way of reading those pages then constantly adjusting font
sizes.

------
yumraj
I find what Apple is attempting to be absolutely ridiculous and rather brazen.

I won't be surprised that if the Safari reader mode becomes popular, the big
content provider and news sites start blocking Safari.

~~~
rimantas
I doubt there is a way to detect is someone uses this mode or not. Safari
loads the full page, and then you have an option to trigger reader mode, which
does not even replace the page: it's like lightbox for images: original page
is dimmed and you get nicely formatted text in front of it.

~~~
yumraj
Not sure why I was downmodded above, but:

I had meant websites can start blocking Safari as a browser and not just the
Safari reader-mode. Since Safari is effectively changing the way a content
provider wants to display their websites and directly impact how they make
money, especially important for news sites, both big and small, no one should
be surprised if they revert to that.

If I was CNN, NYTimes, etc., I would do that.

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alsomike
The only publishers that this will affect are the ones that ignore readability
and user experience. That's the only time you'd use this feature. I think
letting users punish poor design is brilliant way to create the right
incentives.

