IOS9 's ad blocking feature stabbed a deadly stab in the back of Google?

Apple has previously alerted developers in the name of privacy and user preferences, which will add to the iOS9 of the upcoming ads. This is expected to arrive as early as the new iphone on September 9 (in fact postponed). This creates a tense atmosphere among Google, mobile app development, and application publishers.

If the iOS9 and advertising screens are widely used, this means that the $70 billion mobile advertising market will be severely disrupted. The more ad masks, the less ads you can see in the hands-on and mobile apps. There will be less revenue for application publishers, advertising platforms, and marketing companies. Hand-tour companies now do not need to panic, but we'd better wake up more than spirit.

The legitimacy of advertising shielding the war has been staged in the web, and online advertising is a $141 billion market. In May, a court in Germany ruled that advertising shielding was not illegal. In the Mobile world, Apple has added a new change to its platform to support ad masking, allowing third-party companies to develop ad-blocking apps. However, users must install these apps on their own to use these features.

What's confusing is that there are actually two things that are going to affect advertising. From an app developer's point of view, ad masking is very serious, and security policy changes to improve overall security are not important to them.

So ad blocking is definitely more controversial, but Apple is currently only limited to its Safari browser. The question is, why is Apple now implementing the ad blocking feature? Apple's chief executive, Tim Cook, is clear that Apple's focus is on privacy and the protection of user information. But many others regard it as Apple's stab at the back of Google, which is advertising the main source of revenue.

Apple has responded to its position with a corresponding response.

"Our focus on these features has always been to provide better control over privacy,"

An Apple engineer, Benjamin Poulain, wrote.

"We want to implement better privacy filtering, which is why these feature combinations exist today." ”

He also pointed out that:

"Let the user decide what should be loaded, what should not be loaded, who can track their information, what can be displayed on the page, and so on." ”

Users can also start to install the "blacklist" app, which is used to block specified links from being permanently invalidated.

Apple is expected to release iOS9 along with the launch of the new iphone as early as September 9. While Apple does not now develop ad-blocking apps, it allows third-party developers to develop programs that work with the Safari browser on iOS9.

A game publisher, who doesn't want to be named, realizes that mobile Web pages that are accessed on safari are only a limited part of the market. But if ads are blocked on a Web page, there will be a reduction in the number of available developer-selectable AD listings (don't forget that many apps are linked to the page), which leads to an increase in advertising costs. The game publishers expect iOS ads to rise 10%.

"We can see that advertising revenue often accounts for a 20% to 50% monthly income for a gaming company, especially for those small-point hand-tour developers,"

Joost van Dreunen, an analyst and CEO of the Big Data research, said.

"This may hurt these companies in the short term – and I think they will argue that the inability to monetize will hinder the creation of creative games – but in the long run it is worthwhile to provide consumers with a mobile app experience that is no longer so chaotic." “

He then said:

"My point is that Apple is laying out a variety of restrictions on its platform, such as free apps/games (Free-to-play) and Kids Games (kids-focused), around its own ideas. This is just one step in the gradual maturation of the mobile platform into a major platform. Eventually, Apple will force mobile advertising to evolve as it will no longer be dependent on the ad model that mimics web, TV, and Web browsers. “

While providing advertising masking capabilities, Apple has also made another security change, a change that will cause problems for developers and advertising agencies. It introduced an independent security modification called ATS (Application transport Security) on the iOS9. ATS is turned on by default, meaning that an in-app ad link to a specified Web service must pass through a secure transport protocol layer (HTTPS instead of HTTP), or the link will fail.

This secure transport layer eliminates the opportunity for hackers and also prevents intentioned developers from stealing private data from users. But it also invalidates a lot of legitimate advertising links-if developers and advertising agencies don't notice the switch. Apple has previously alerted developers and advertising agencies that they must make changes to their apps in order to prevent links from failing. Google has thrown some criticism out of it, suggesting that developers could try to turn off the ATS feature in this case, but then the comment was triggered (Apple?). Complaint, Google began to explain that it only suggested that if other methods did not work, then to shut down ATS this feature. Apple itself is the same advice, so the question of ATS does not reveal that Apple and Google have thus caused discord.

Rob Weber, chief executive of native X, feels more worried about the impact of "native advertising". A native ad is a type of ad that looks like part of an app running inside an app. When users click on these native ads, these links often navigate to a virtual Goods purchase window inside the app or game. Many developers have also implemented the ability to navigate to the Apple App Store after they click on an ad. App publishers also navigate to their own servers for traffic tracking, and so on.

If developers do not modify their code, these ads may be invalidated because the links will not happen again. Weber claimed that his company had already added relevant updates to their software development packages so that developers could update their applications before they could cause revenue loss.

"While this change will protect iOS users, it will cost them $ tens of billions of in advertising if the app publishers and mobile advertisers don't update their apps in a timely manner," he said.

Weber said in an interview with Gamebeat.

"Chain contacts are advertising, and now links can be blocked. This will affect all ad platforms or app developers who don't have ATS applied to their ads. “

In fact, one of the problems is that the advertising platform has to be changed, but they don't have the huge resources of engineers to handle it. This can cause problems.

In an article, Google suggested that new application developers should only use the HTTPS protocol, while developers who have already released applications should switch to HTTPS as soon as possible. But as mentioned earlier, it also points out that in order for existing ads to continue to operate on iOS9 devices, the short-term solution is to turn off the functionality of ATS so that ads that are not built on the secure Transport layer can be loaded successfully.

Later in the article, Google added:

"We have received important feedback from many readers in this article and we need to clarify a few points here." The reason we wrote this article was because the developers consulted us about the resources available to meet the upcoming iOS9, so we gave them some choices. Again, developers should consider turning off ATS functionality only when other ways are not feasible. Apple provides a technical document that includes a variety of solutions, including the option to enable ATS capabilities for a range of HTTPS sites. “

More articles please pay attention to the public number: Techgogogo or personal blog http://techgogogo.com. Of course, you are also very welcome to pick up directly (ZHUBAITIAN1). The English version of this article is from VentureBeat, the Chinese version is compiled by Heaven Zhuhai Branch Rudder.

IOS9 's ad blocking feature stabbed a deadly stab in the back of Google?