If Wired wants the article to be exclusive on Apple News, fine, but in that case it should not be on the website. Keep it exclusively on Apple News. There is no content on this page beyond a headline.
Google should penalize sites that do that exactly the way they are penalizing sites with banners telling visitors to get their app. If you want your content on the web and have the benefits of it being on the web (searchable, linkable, etc) put it on the web. If you want it "exclusively on Apple News", put it there. But you shouldn't get to have your cake and eat it too.
Time limited exclusive content on puff pieces just isnt a priority for me.
I mean, wired is given ng the content away free. I don't have a "human right" to read this.
Is it a slippery slope? Perhaps. What if real news gets walled off like this? US presidential debates being on cable only (or TV only for cord cutters) seems a bigger problem to me.
There's a lot of nuance to this issue, but I lean towards wired being fine. Though, I don't think the headline should have been displayed on the main page of non apple news devices, I don't know if it was. We all got there via a hacker news direct link.
It was listed at the top of Wired.com for regular web browsers earlier today, in their Latest News column. It now appears to have been pulled from that section, even if you click through to the archives.
The comments you are replying to were not complaining that wired chose to make the news only available via apple news.
They were complaining that they still posted the article, sans content, on the web, and suggested that should be punished for diluting web content. (they appear to have since removed that web-based article)
I think US Presidential debates are actually trending towards streaming. As I remember the last presidential debate in 2012 was on YouTube streaming and CNN recently streamed their Republican Primary debates to anyone in the US. I hope other networks follow this trend for the upcoming election season.
Penalize the site or the story? Should Google keep it out of search until it shows up on the "greater" web or are you advocating punishing the whole site because they have some content exclusively walled for a certain amount of time?
The whole site. The site is in the best position to know what is publicly available and which is within the walled garden and should adjust their robots.txt or spider responses to match. You pee in the pool, you have to take a time out.
The one issue I have with that thought (without putting much thought into it myself) is the conflict of interest. By punishing Wired, Google is saying that the only approved (by Google) income stream is through advertising (Google's main revenue stream) and that other types of creative partnerships may lead to websites being downlinked (and downranking past the 1st or 2nd page is almost equivalent to delisting).
That line of thinking also begs the question whether only freely accessible information should come up on web searches, which would rule out any links to many professional journals which survive by subscription and/or fees per article. If you're punishing Wired for putting articles behind walled garden then it makes sense to punish all walled gardens and Google search becomes a search engine cataloging only free articles.
Google is only transitively punishing Wired through their exclusivity agreement with Apple News, where they both decided to wall it off, not anything about creative partnerships or Google ads. Plenty of Google results come from sites that don't use Google advertising features, and walled off content can remain just so.
There is certainly a discussion to be had where major sites are allowing Google to spider paywalled posts such that the content comes up in results based on hidden-to-the-rube words, but that's for another time.
I see your point especially with google almost having a monopoly in web search, however I think its only fair that a site shows the same thing to humans as it does to web crawler bots, otherwise it opens up a huge can of worms and breaks search with tons of site baiting and switching.
Yeah. I agree, there should be some signal when looking through searches what is paywall content vs what is free. I'd be for Google punishing sites that don't differentiate (at least without putting to much thought into the subject).
Why do you think Google is on your side, and will pull it from the results? Precedents [1] would indicate that it will appease moneyed interests, and dish out penalties in unequal terms.
Most of Apple News articles actually arrive via RSS, but top tier publishers (which Wired certainly is) push articles into Apple News via a private web API.
It should. But it hasn't yet. Right now, if I google "architect transforming NYC", this article is the first search result. Yet, when I click it, I am told to buy an Apple device and download Apple News.
Well Apple could simply be holding up Job's legacy by doing their damn best to control advertising content/revenue simply to damage Google.
There are a serious number of iOS devices out there, considering Apple's history with books, movies, and even music, who isn't to say they simply see this market as a win win, win in there is more money to be had, win in that it damages google; whom Jobs didn't like one bit for copying so much of what the iPhone brought to the table
The page will not be thin content once the exclusivity expires. Even if Google punished the page in the interim, it would not matter much, because Google drives very little of the initial traffic to articles. Social channels eclipsed it long ago. Google is more important for providing a "thick tail" of traffic after the initial social spike.
Wired will be losing ad revenue due to Apple adding ad blocking abilities to mobile Safari. So, Wired moves content to Apple News which has ads that can't be blocked (and Apple conveniently takes a nice juicy cut of).
Yes and no. This is basically a little bit disingenuous.
Today, most publications will use something like DoubleClick to manage their ads, sell a bunch directly to specific companies, setup bidding on some others via another provider hooked into the same system, and then use Google AdSense for the remnant inventory.
From my reading of it, on Apple News, you're required to use iAd to manage the inventory. iAd allows you to do direct sales through it's own system. And then all the rest are remnant and handled through iAd. Apple locks out all other players from that large part of the ad market, including Google. Knowing Apple... especially Google.
It's a brilliant two-pronged strategy to lock content providers and consumers into the Apple ecosystem.
The setup you describe is only true of very small publishers (i.e. a single site). iAd is essentially a supply-side platform (SSP); just like DoubleClick. A large publisher like Wired will use what's called a demand-side platform (DSP) -- something like Auditude or Freewheel. This would allow you to manage ad sales between 3rd party ad networks, data partners, internal sales and remnant inventory in a way that provides the publisher with control over what ads get shown. A common setup is to bid an impression against multiple ad networks (and local inventory) based on the user's data profile (obtained from a data provider). Google consolidates all of this themselves, which makes it easier if you're small, but any major publisher is going to handle ad sales at least partially in house. Ad sales are the revenue stream, and you just don't outsource your revenue generation process -- period.
There's just a conflict of interest in doing it any other way. A DSP wants to play multiple SSPs against each other to get the highest priced ads for its content while preserving the user experience (DSPs often include features that allow you restrict the number of times an ad shows to the same user, etc). The SSPs are looking to get the best results for their advertisers at the lowest price.
It's not a brilliant move because platform lock-in is too easy to avoid thanks to the myriad of ad tech providers in the space. Apple will get some app developers and small sites with this, but 95% of the market has evolved past a solution like this into something far more "enterprise".
How can I monetize my content?
You can monetize your Apple News Format content with
iAd, Apple’s advertising platform. Whether you sell your
own ads or have iAd sell on your behalf, you’ll earn
revenue from every impression in your articles and channels.
I think there's almost no chance that the percentage of iOS users blocking ads is enough to meaningfully impact Wired's overall revenue from that story. Even given that ad blocking apps have been top sellers, it's still only available on iOS 9, which has been out less than a week. So surely revenue from all web users (without an ad blocker) outweigh the (presumably) tiny amount of ad revenue Wired will earn from Apple News. And even if all that were false, why would Wired alone give in so readily to what's basically bullying? It's just not a credible theory.
Way more likely is that Apple is paying them a nice chunk of cash for the exclusivity to help market their News app. Same thing they did with HBO Now for the Apple TV, and with various albums for the iTunes Store and Apple Music.
My understanding of Apple News is that it has nothing to do with iOS 9 content blocking. Apple News is a dedicated app that functions somewhat like an RSS reader serving up a special Readability-style version of the content. Even if you don't install an ad-blocker in iOS 9, you still don't see banner ads and such in Apple News.
That said, I imagine you're right and Apple just paid for the exclusive for marketing purposes.
The point that is being made is that by cutting off a fraction of mobile ad revenue by allowing blockers, Apple might be seen to be cynically herding content providers towards its walled-garden platform wherein iAd is the exclusive provider of adverts, which cannot be blocked. Whether this is the true intention of their strategy or merely a coincidence is a matter of some (understandably contentious) debate.
Every single user could block ads until mobile began taking over. Media companies hyping how damaging ad blockers are this past week and a half is that they have successfully created mass awareness that you may block ads.
If you are a publisher there are scripts and tools you may use to detect ad blockers. I would recommend running one.
It's almost certain that Apple's long game is to make this the norm. If there's one surefire way to get people addicted to ad blockers, it's to make them available on mobile devices. Once enough content creators start moving content behind News-walls, then Apple can roll out desktop versions of News. And as people then start asking each other "how do I get ad blocking in my browser as well," Apple's well positioned to be the only unblockable advertising platform, period. They could even use iTunes as a vector to deliver an Apple News desktop app to Windows machines.
It's brilliant and will completely change the balance of power in online advertising. Google will not be happy...
Locking away articles in native apps so people can't block ads isn't brilliant. Apple encouraging ad blocking on the web to "nudge" publishers into their exclusive native eco-system is nothing but typical tech giant arrogance.
Wired publishing stories that when clicked from Google go to place-holders with pointers to native should be penalised by Google search, and I hope they are. There is nothing on the Google results page to indicate the link is anything less than the content.
Native app "content browsers" are all about less control for users. Native has always been about that. Sometimes less control works for users. No distractions, just minimal concentrated function. Other times, like with news articles, users are missing out on basic things like bookmarking; sharing the link - there isn't even a link; accessibility is out the window; copy and paste is out the window; discussion and comments are all but closed/extinct; no choice of browser to access the article. It's not good news for users.
I don't get it. Firefox and Chrome had ability to install ad blockers for ages. As soon as Apple adds this to iOS they are sudenly the bad gays.
And before they did add this I am sure there were those not happy about that and ranting about the walled garden.
One more thing about accessibility: iOS is head and sholders above pretty much each "modern" this site in this regard.
"I don't get it. Firefox and Chrome had ability to install ad blockers for ages..."
The point is, while introducing ad-blocking for iOS Safari, Apple are simultaneously promoting a separate platform that is immune to ad-blocking.
Apple would call it "business" and that would be valid. But when the "business" involves shifty one-two deals with publishers like Wired, whereby the website becomes nothing more than a jump-point to the app, suddenly we have a situation where not just particular technologies like Flash are in the cross-hairs, but the web itself.
We like the web, remember? When it works well it's the most accessible, light-weight, least technical-debt means to online content there is, both for users and developers/publishers.
Note that Apple are not allowing developers to write any old add-on for iOS Safari. Imagine if they opened up add-ons for Safari? That would be worth applauding. We could then fix many of iOS Safari's shortcomings, and give it some much needed extra functionality.
"One more thing about accessibility: iOS is head and sholders above"
The web has more accessible characteristics built-in because of the way the data is openly available to different clients. Native apps controlled by one vendor like Apple are the complete opposite. Regardless of some advances in accessibility options within apps, accessibility isn't among the "out of the box" strengths of the technology you get for free like you do for web.
I don't think you're taking into account that websites are free to create their own apps, and advertise there. There's little incentive for a content creator to have their content off the net, and into someone else's apps.
Im not understanding Wired's motivation here, but I'm not too concerned because Wired isn't the most intelligent publication in the first place.
I pine for the WIRED of yesteryear. The current publication is but a pallid, embarrassing shadow of a formerly brilliant publication. It's now on a par with VICE, GQ or some such, and quite frankly, it is heartbreaking. The guiding light of my youth essentially extinguished (particularly as I grew up in nineties Italy, from where it provided a fascinating and prescient window into the social aspects of tech).
You assume everyone and their grandmother has Apple-equipment.
Most of the world doesn't.
Saying that you will only do business with those who has Apple-equipment is leaving out most of the market, and doing so would be suicide for most businesses.
Technically true, but most of the world doesn't matter. Only the part which has disposable income does. The more disposable income, the more it matters.
Last I heard, Apple had around 50% market share in the US and going up. And I'm betting that it's the 50% that matters most.
This deeply concerns me. There's some debate as to the future efficacy of this tactic, but it is possible to imagine a scenario in which Apple is successful at moving content into its private service. The obvious downside of this is that a single company now controls what used to be an open publishing platform. What are the chances that Apple allows you to publish controversial articles to its service, particularly those criticizing Apple? And how are users on non-Apple platforms to get access to this info? This move doesn't even really benefit Apple users since the news app will still display ads, just controlled by a different tech company. This is good for Apple, but neutral to bad for the rest of us.
Can't a simple solution be: websites detect if their ads are being blocked (by iOS9 or whatever) and blur their content until the user disables the adblock?
That's certainly an option, but probably not a very useful one. It's like stopping piracy. Piracy can actually have a positive affect on sales. Person A who pirates your software or music doesn't pay you, but they tell other people about it, and some of them, who wouldn't have known about it, do pay for it leading to more sales than you would have otherwise had.
It's the same with content. If I go to read your article and you block it because I'm blocking ads, I'm not going to tell anyone about it and I'm not going to share the link. You then don't get the ad revenue from that sharing, so it's a net loss for you.
(And of course, if I go to read it, and it says I need a special app, I'm also not going to read it or share the link.)
The only way you'd ever get users to disable their ad blockers on your website would be injecting them with a fast-acting poison and publishing directions to the antidote. If a regular publisher of article-based content tried this, they would just end up with no readers.
Newsstand does not exist any more.
iAd… I guess it still exists, but I wonder how long will it last. Ads are very unpopular among iOS users. I doubt Apple was thinking about making much money from it, more like they gave an alternative way to make money to developers.
This word applies to Google in regards to ads. For apple hardware=money. And promising better security and less tracking for the users they can sell more hardware.
They'd better be getting an extra cut for the exclusivity period, though. Otherwise that part would be pointless. They could just serve this page for only IOS9 devices based on user agent.
It should be noted, (although I may be alone here on this) I'm not seeing any ads on the Apple News story. My guess, is the story is to gauge traffic and _ad potential_.
If the conspiracy theorists are right, the whole ad-blocking on ios is a ploy to get the ad-starved publishers, and thus the masses, off the web-based internet and onto in-app content silos such as Apple News.
If they're wildly successful, the only ones left on the traditional internet would be those not producing content for money.
Does that mean I'll be able to experience the internet the way the old-timers reminisce? Before Eternal September[0]?
I've always felt bad I missed thosed times, and while this would certainly be a regression for the society at large, I think that would be something I'd like to experience :)
Eternal September? The internet was still great from that regard (tons of people "not producing content for money"), no big central control, no FB/Google/Twitter/etc, until around the time we got Google.
There was AOL of course, but that was mostly mocked by people on the "real" internet.
>and while this would certainly be a regression for the society at large
Actually, it might be a huge improvement. Technofiles will never go for this, but after a point technology in a societal context can have not just diminishing returns but even spoil good things (like going to a concert in your 20s without being glued to a smartphone screen).
>The internet was still great... until around the time we got Google.
Not that I necessarily agree with your assertion, it's worth emphasizing the reason that Google took off: search just plain sucked before Google came on the scene.
Personally, my only real issue with Google is the decline in precise search result quality since they got rid of the + operator.
You can search for a precise phrase using quotation marks. You can also prevent Google from returning assumed synonyms of a word by putting that single word in quotes.
The big difference is that now you are often mislead by synonyms. Previously it would return 0 and you'd think for second and find alternative keyword. Now you'll spend minutes until you realise that what you are seeing is nonsense. Also, removal of some keywords completely messed this up again.
> The internet was still great ... until around the time we got Google.
Depressingly accurate.
Alas, the probable trajectory is not all-out war on Google,
but rather a number of plausible threats followed by a hammering out of market boundaries followed by a tacit non-compete between the players.
You have to admit that after establishing its dominance Google started to dictate its own rules for web design, rather than adapting to the pages people already had. Google's algorithm that places incoming links above anything else for relevance is singlehandedly responsible for forum spambots, fake websites, and the dynamic where new websites have no chance to compete with something established, unless they run some kind of marketing campaign to "seed" the links.
The Eternal September started in 1993, and I don't know if you remember what the internet was like at that time, but I do and I wouldn't go back to it.
There are plenty other ways to make money on the internet. Paywalls (stratechery), sponsors (daring fireball), native advertising (buzzfeed). Also maybe we will see rise of better ad networks (the deck) that people will not actually block?
Advertising will survive in some form, hopefully better for all of us than the current mess.
>> If they're wildly successful, the only ones left on the traditional internet would be those not producing content for money.
Well, what it actually means is that folks who monetize their content in ways other than ads could begin to have an advantage. For example, Red Bull Media monetizes their content with drink sales. PBS, NPR, and Think Progress monetize their content with donations.
Apple and others are entitled to keep their strategies unsaid, unconfirmed. Which leaves only speculation, which turns into observation when we see Wired's lead website story is nothing but a signpost to Apple native land. A happy land with double rainbows, shooting stars and perfectly trimmed hedges.
Couple of minutes ago I didn't know about Apple News and didn't care about a superstar architect. Now I still don't care about a superstar architect but already hate Apple News and Wired for presenting me with a link to an article I can not read.
It would be nice if hacker news would allow you to block sites in your profile. I'd love to block any article on medium.com, wired.com or nytimes.com; they all seem to be empty fluff articles.
Wired's already a bad egg in my book for refusing to allow the first part of their articles in RSS and reader apps like Feedly. While every other website shows me the first paragraph in the app before I tap the link, Wired just gives their bullshit "This article first appeared on Wired" blurb
That's extremely annoying behavior. I get where they coming from - if you read excerpts on RSS you don't visit the site for that, so no ad impressions - but I usually just ignore such sites altogether. I have no time to click on every link in the feed to just know what it is about.
I use macbooks as my work machines for some time, and Mac OS X ecosystem seems to be open enough to allow productive work and most other uses without too much trouble. So they did pretty well there.
However, the mobile (and adjacent, such as Apple TV, etc.) story is pretty bad, I completely avoid it. I had an iPad which was a gift so I used it for a while, but as soon as I got Android tablet and smartphone I switched and never looked back. As for content services, I'd never go near Apple ones, I've tried to use iTunes, no more, thankyouverymuch.
BTW, last time I looked Apple TV 2 on ebay costs double of Apple TV 3. Because jailbreak.
This reminds me of the early days of CompuServe and Prodigy, which had exclusive content*. It worked for a while until the open web became the bigger audience that dwarfed all others. I think the big players now may be repeating patterns of the past. Open standards tend to trump closed platforms over time. If this is the case it presents an opportunity to create a new open version of what Apple is doing now. Web 4.0?
>Open standards tend to trump closed platforms over time.
The opposite is true, and what is happening to the Internet is another example. Telephone, Radio, and Film used to be open but they have since been cornered by cartels. Tim Wu explains this excellently in his book, "The Master Switch."
It seems ominous if you regard telephone, radio transmission, and the internet as three different things. The pattern appears to be that an innovation lands and is then co-opted by pre-existing powers, who find ways to cause its open nature to be less attractive and instead morph it into something closed and read-only.
However, if you view these things (and many others) are part of the same progression of the human species, things look quite a bit brighter.
John Walker (founder of Autodesk) called it the Digital Imprimatur over a decade ago. The scenario he predicted was off a bit in a few areas, but the general problem he describes - of rent seekers trying to turn the internet back into something closer to cable TV - is frighteningly close to what has been happening in the tech industry.
I will check out that book, thanks. But the history of the web shows how an open network killed the content silos of AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve, etc. Yes, now things seem to be swinging back, perhaps due to the popularity of mobile apps and poor user experience of the mobile web.
I believe this is the primary driver. We already have Facebook introducting "free limited Internet" to developing regions of India [0] and mobile carriers in the U.S. already allow certain apps to be excluded from data usage. The open Internet is not a guarantee, and the next generation of web users may not know the 'wild west' we did.
Facebook free zones are just ad supported ISPs, like NetZero of years ago. Until they actually block non-FB content, it is just grousing about gratis, not libre.
I don't think that's necessarily the natural direction- as you say, it's just that more powerful players are, in the case of the Internet, now able to push their influence until it results in a monopoly over information. What we are seeing is a result of the failure of our systems- I still believe that open standards will tend to trump closed platforms over time, if they are allowed to.
There is no "natural direction" because the systems, in this context, are not natural. The platforms will only remain open so long as we fight to keep them that way. We're not doing a very good job, either; the Internet is moving to a closed system very rapidly.
Apple News isn't available in a lot of countries for whatever reason. So this not only means its inaccessible to non-iOS9 devices, but it's also inaccessible to, eg., all of New Zealand.
I'm guessing it's just a paucity of news agencies in the given country that have set up a feed in Apple News format; Apple doesn't want to flip the switch for a country until they have a good default selection of that country's local feeds to let people pick from.
I noticed that on the iOS9 beta, with my region set to Canada, the News app was unavailable, but on the springboard search view, the embedded news items were from (two) Canadian sources. So it seems like they're working on it.
Worth trying only for short term curiosity. Beyond that it's a clumsy workaround with consequences for other apps and services that depend on the region being true.
I imagine their bounce rate will be very high if they continue doing this. Other news sites have done similar things such as make you participate in a survey before reading the article. In order for me to open this article before September 22, I would have to copy that link, paste it into an email to myself, open Mail on my phone, and open the link from my own email.
Quora permanently lost me several years ago when they suddenly forced me to select five categories of interest before I could continue to the question I was interested in.
Forcing me to do something I have no interest in and will never make use of is a good way to alienate me.
The "block element" feature of muBlock allows you to block the popup that asks you to register. Just right-click on the popup, use "Block element", highlight the popup, click "Create", and do the same for the opaque background.
In my experience, blocking cookies and/or using incognito mode works to block off their solicitations. Now if only someone would find a solution for Scribd..
Don't bother, on the 22nd, it will probably be one of the top titles on Hacker News: "Remember this article that used to be exclusive on Apple News? Now you can read it!".
Well of note, listening to talk radio one thing I heard is true. The consumer will decide this in the end. However don't expect Madsion Avenue to take it laying down.
they will go the route radio went years ago, they will setup ads like news stories and blog articles and get to the point to where it will be hard to distinguish until you have absorbed a good part of the material.
I guess the real question will be if the reduced pageviews offset the increased ad impressions. As much as I also hate those popups (I often leave the page), I imagine they've done enough split testing to know that it at least helps their bottom line in the short term.
Well, I've seen a bigger website change their layout completely believing it would increase ad impressions, assuming that users scrolled down on their page. It went live, their profit was reduced to less than half, thousands of people lost their job. The new layout stayed.
My Dad: "What's this 'News' app?"
Me: "It's new with iOS 9. It's a little news reader. You tell it what you're interested in, and it'll show you articles."
Dad: "Cool" <proceeds to spend an hour with it>
But it's a default auto-installed app (on iOS9) and the headlines are on the search / Siri Suggestions screen. I'd be surprised if it doesn't already have a huge market...
Maybe for you (and me too) but for the general public, the default apps are used a hell of a lot. 50% of users use the default notes app[1], for example. Apple Maps (which based on the press, many might assume isn't used at all) has 3.5x the usage of Google Maps[1].
I don't know whether there are any other stats out there, but I suspect that for most people, there's no need to install a custom podcast app, for example, when the default one works just fine for them.
"Meet the Superstar Architect Transforming NYC’s Skyline" sounds like an ad, anyway. That's not time-critical information. The fluff news in "Dwell", "Food and Wine", and "Drive" sections of many major newspapers are now generated by Demand Media and others of that ilk. This may be a non-problem.
When we start seeing articles about presidential debates, wars, and other major events handled that way, it's time to pay attention.
Theory: Apple wants to defeat Google by eliminating ads and making the purchase of the device the amortized payment for content.
Analysis: The problem with this strategy is that Apple is going to have to scale to all the content in the world, in foreign languages, on obscure or controversial topics on a million blogs. Super niche content will fade, starved of app revenue and have to rely on native IOS ad with unblockable ads for distribution.
Well maybe not all ads, but it is clear that the carotid artery of Google is Ads (and web Ads to be specific) so carving off channels and feeding them into Apple at the source device is a way of "competing" without having to have better Ad reach.
I continue to think the end of this is going to be some sort of 'content tax' (everythings a paywall) and people will complain about how they don't get any free content any more but the rest of us will get a respite from the increasingly egregious ads that were trying to monetize content.
Well in this case it is the other way around, its that people who have already bought into the device are given this special "privilege" which perhaps makes them feel special.
I think out of the set of possible Internet users, you can differentiate somewhat a group who reads their news on an iDevice. So Apple achieves a certain demographic, and they cater to them with a more curated news experience. Banking on the idea that the people involved will prefer it over the existing channel. Presumably they are already a good group to market to, after all they bought an expensive device and consume news on it, so Apple works to parlay that value into an income stream.
The alternative of having some sort of alternate version of Wired if your user-agent says "iDevice" is much more difficult to control/authenticate relative to the advertiser's expected market.
The next step would be to add blocking vs money as an option. Lets say you buy 1500 "Apple Points" and for 5 points you can "block" (in the sense of it is completely not there) an Ad from your Media. Now when a page comes up and your AdBlocker fires, it consumes 5 points. Perhaps Apple gives 2 points to the media provider to compensate them for not having an ad shown, and keeps 3 pts for itself. Once the user runs out of points and ads start reappearing they can buy more in the Apple Store.
What this does is allows people to convert over from paying with Ad clicks to paying with Apple pts. If you make the conversion rate of Apple Points to dollars fungible, then you can tune the experience to get the most value for the publisher and thus insure them of an income stream, even if all their readers/viewers/players block all of the ads. That then would become the base line value (based on user views) for a property. Robots of course would not have Apple pts and so could be more easily distinguished.
Its a clever plan, I don't know if they can pull it off but something to watch. The current Ad / AdBlocker nonsense is going to reach crisis level here pretty quickly.
Thank - you've succinctly put into words what's been bothering me about this whole affair.
Economically, I am in the long tail (middle class 3rd worlder) and I think I've found the disconnect between me & the anti-ad folk. They are bothered by ads, and think if ad-supported sites shut down, nothing of value will be lost. Whereas I am not bothered enough by ads to feel strongly about it, and I don't want the ad-supported sites I frequent to disappear. I most likely won't afford to pay subscriptions in a post-ad world.
I don't mind individuals blocking ads, but I fear the entire ad-supported ecosystem will be destroyed if a critical mass is reached.
Apple has done a pretty good job of building and supporting a long tail of apps. They're working on it with music. Why can't they take that model to content?
Prediction: Apple Blogs. It's like the app store, but for blogs. You need a mac to create content for it. Free and premium blogs, In blog purchase, etc.
This is because Apple knows very little about algorithmic internet-wide Search or much of anything on the algorithmic level when compared to Google. Think about the maps debacle, its horrible email search, its purchase of Chomp to help it figure out app search.
Apple builds the nice looking robots, Google builds the brains.
Well, looks like somebody found a "cure" for adblock ;)
I miss the Wired of ten years ago. Now whenever I pick one up I am immensely disappointed by the hype and marketing. I remember it being more rigorous with respect to both journalism and technical acumen.
Edit: or not, per other post regarding adblock coming soon to apple.
This is what I said ten years ago! In truth Wired has always been a lot of hand-wavy hype wrapped around bits of legit interest. I think you just outgrow it eventually.
Those bits of interest have become more mainstream and the same content can be found in more detail elsewhere. 10-20 yrs ago Wired was often the first place to get that information (or at least the first without digging).
How different is this (from an ad biz perspective) from Facebook Instant Articles? Is it that Apple gets no cut from publisher-sold ads, but Facebook Instant Articles only use Facebook ads? Do either of these services have some sort of exclusivity clause (ala Youtube, where if you publish one place you have to publish to Youtube too)?
EDIT: it looks like Facebook Instant Articles also takes 0% of publisher-served ads [1]. So it looks like this Apple News push is merely an attempt to match Facebook's product (and Wired screwed up messaging / accessibility here).
I'm still curious as to if anybody can add commentary / context from an advertising point of view.
IMO these events indicate a future where portals serve publisher content in a way that improves user experience (fewer ads, faster page load times) while the publishers catch up (rather than replace) their own native web experience. Publishers will want to own their distribution if it does them well. These plays (Apple, Facebook) may be less about poaching display dollars from Google than 1) cutting low-quality advertisers out of the network and 2) increasing hub engagement. I doubt the hubs monopolize the market but I'm definitely no expert
This is the wrong direction. What users want are unobtrusive ads and what content creators want is to get paid. Apple and Facebook are trying to take advantage of this by pushing users to their AOL-esque walled gardens. We need a browser standard for built-in unobtrusive ads or payments so content creators can get paid and users don't get stuck with AOL 2.0.
Why do we need a browser standard for built-in unobtrusive ads? We already have a standard to carry ads - it's called HTML. Adding an out-of-band ad carrying system is not only, and in my opinion, an unethical subterfuge, as it won't work against heavy-handed ad-blockers anyway: they'll just evolve to block that too.
The point isn't to force ads down the user's throat, it's to show ads in a way that's uniform and tolerable, as Apple is attempting to do with Apple News. An ad blocker can be built for Apple News too (and has been) but I'd rather that not be necessary in the first place.
Apple is not "trying to take advantage of this" - it's an active participant! I'm sure there are several Sun Tzu quotes that can describe the unfolding proxy war.
This is disappointing. It's a move against the open Internet than Wired helped to popularize (I previously worked at Wired). It also is a slap in the face to Android and other non-iOS users.
Disclaimer: My own startup released iOS and Android news apps this month that are in the same space as Apple News: https://recent.io/
If Wired makes this practice standard for articles on their website, I will seriously consider dropping my subscription. I understand that the two are not directly linked, but this new tactic seems toxic and I do not want to support it in any way.
The client you are using does not currently have access to this resource but may in the future as specified by the Expires header in the response. The user should either switch to a supported client as specified in the response body to access this resource or the current client should retry at the specified date. The current client MUST NOT retry the resource before the specified date.
We can use existing REST methodology to serve coffee from coffee pots. Send a POST request to the coffee pot with parameters for the required type of coffee. The server on the coffee pot responds with 200 OK if it can process the request and makes the coffee. 500 if there was a problem.
WHEN method is unnecessary, use GET to retrieve status.
"418 I'm a teapot" is also unncessary, just use 500.
But this is hardly new. I believe a lot of magazines released their article in print first then in their web edition for a wider public access.
Only thing that is wrong here is this offensive reminder that iOS users now have privilege over everyone else. Smart move, Wired. It is an excellent advertisement for Apple News, but not so much for publisher themselves, I believe.
This is how I imagine it went:
Apple: "We'll give you a lot of money if you make content exclusive to us"
Wired: "Lets trial run it with one article and see how it goes, and we'd like the exclusivity period to expire"
Apple: "Sure, but we'll have to come back to the timed exclusivity, we think you'll cave"
Apple: "We will feature Wired in the WWDC keynote, and give it a prominent place in the News app when people are choosing sources. In exchange, we want a few exclusive articles."
Pretty much Apple pays a deal to Wired for this exclusive treatment. But why Wired tries to show an empty article that humiliates everyone else is beyond me.
If there's no well known work around for the paywall, this type of content from Wired shouldn't be on HN. On a personal note. it saddens me to see Wired deliberately making the world wide web suck.
Wired have now joined apple on my list of companies to boycott for life. Personally I'll be adding any company to the list that joins in with this kind of crap - deliberately creating an online 'second class' is unacceptable. Don't let these bastards win.
Additional fun fact: Publishers can't opt out of having their RSS feeds included in Apple News without signing up for an Apple ID. I wonder if that means Apple News will ignore robots.txt.
Why would a publisher opt out of having their feeds visible to any particular platform? The whole point of making an RSS feed available is so that it's *available" to any client that can read it.
As much as I don't like what Wired and Apple are doing in terms of using the web to promote native exclusivity, RSS should be open to all by default.
As for robots.txt in web pages, I agree that Apple News should be respecting those.
Considering the way this is all working, there's a good chance Apple may filter ads out of RSS feeds. Or disallow launching a real web browser from Apple News in the future to keep consumers in one interface they control.
It's not like this is a 'win' for Apple - the news app isn't globally available (I think it's just US?) so this sure doesn't do wonders for my opinion of them. Oh well guess I'll just wait a day and see if I even remember to go check back. (I probably won't, I have a bad memory)
The question that immediately comes to my mind is how do they know whether that URL (the news.apple.com one) is being accessed from the app or not? It redirects immediately back to wired.com, so could it be as trivial as User-agent or some other header?
This is actually a good reason to use the native iOS push notification, instead of such thin content to grab eyeballs. The former is well targeted and less spammy IMO.
War is not so subtle any more. Lack of web browser on apple tv. Content blockers on iOS 9. Exclusive content. Makes me want to join ad company and help the fight on their side, just because. Fscked I know.
The title you're reading is what we changed it to.
The submitted title was "This story is exclusively on Apple News until Tuesday". We changed it to an exact quote from the article and put it in quotation marks.
And if I want 𝗯𝗼𝗹𝗱 text? I know how to get italics.
Most typographs disagree with using italics:
> If you’re using a sans serif font, skip italic and use bold for emphasis. It’s not usually worth italicizing sans serif fonts—unlike serif fonts, which look quite different when italicized, most sans serif italic fonts just have a gentle slant that doesn’t stand out on the page.
Eh, I read quite a few books that say the opposite
> If you’re using a sans serif font, skip italic and use bold for emphasis. It’s not usually worth italicizing sans serif fonts—unlike serif fonts, which look quite different when italicized, most sans serif italic fonts just have a gentle slant that doesn’t stand out on the page.
As I answered to several other comments, this is not a helpful suggestion when most typographers suggest to use bold for emphasis of sans-serif fonts, as italic with sans-serif is less noticeable than 𝗯𝗼𝗹𝗱.
I don't know if a war on ads is coming. I mean, the Browser Sexurity Handbook details how 3rd party cookie policies are pretty schitzophrenic across browsers already (MSIE requires a privacy policy, Safari requires a "visit" to a domain which can be accomplished by POSTing into an iframe, Firefox does something else, and Chrome thankfully just works).
But regardless, we should be moving past ads and to deals. Past eyeballs and to saving people time. Past destination sites and to tools that help people. Past building online personas and to improving real world experience. Ads means "here please click maybe you'll like this and eventually pay money for something." It's not the best we can do.
Before the web, people used to have more real connections in real life. Look at pictures from before 1990 - people were out and knew others from their neighborhood! Now they compulsively check their phones every time they emit a sound because of some notification, and verbal communication has devolved into kthanxbai lol... and the lol is almost never an actual laugh. Think about it.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604719?hl=en
If Wired wants the article to be exclusive on Apple News, fine, but in that case it should not be on the website. Keep it exclusively on Apple News. There is no content on this page beyond a headline.