10 Years Ago This Week: Apple and the Ad Blockers

To celebrate 10 years of Creator Weekly, I’m sharing tech highlights from 2015 that still resonate 10 years later. This update was for the week of September 19, 2015.

Ten years ago this week, iOS 9 launched with new support for ad blockers and publishers were concerned this would kill their revenue. Apple's new News app wasn't really an alternative.

Ad Blocking for the iPhone 

Did Apple "change the web forever"? TIME Magazine suggested they could. 

In 2015 big news and magazine publishers were struggling. Some were pivoting to video. Digital advertising revenue was flat on desktop, but growing on mobile. 

So the news that iOS 9, launched in September 2015, had added support for ad blockers was of huge concern. Previously ad blockers weren’t possible on the iPhone. 

Time magazine declared this could "change the web forever", and noted, “In the days since iOS 9’s release, ad blockers quickly became the best selling software in the App Store.”

Google at least partially reversed their Play Store ad block ban in 2016, allowing blocking in browsers, but not other apps.

The Apple News App

The Apple News app landing page in October 2015

Apple also launched the Apple News app in 2015, starting with 50 titles. It later let sites opt-in, but that wasn't something that smaller sites could easily do. 

And unlike a RSS feed reader, it has an algorithmic "For You" feed, showing articles it thinks the reader will be interested in.

It included ads, but it took a cut if they were sourced through Apple's iAd platform. In more recent years, publishers have complained that the revenue is low.

The launch of Apple News at the same time ad blockers became available seemed calculated to some.  An article in Wired summed up the feeling: 

It’s no coincidence, however, that ad blocking capabilities are coming on iOs 9 in tandem with Apple’s answer to the problems it creates. We’ll help you, Apple is telling publishers, but give us some control and a share of ad revenue (if we help you sell ads). 

This may have been a solution for larger publishers, but for most bloggers and small publishers it was out of reach.

What about replacing ads? 

Google Contributor website, captured in June 2017

If readers don't want to see ads, they may be willing pay directly instead.  Readers don't necessarily want to pay for a full subscription, so it would have to be at the article level.

Google Contributor Subscriptions

With that in mind, and peaking publisher concern, Google made a push for adoption of Google Contributor.

Google Contributor subscriptions launched as an experiment in November 2014. Readers contribute money each month, see fewer ads, and publishers get a cut of the subscription revenue.

But, as Information Week pointed out, Contributor only blocked a fraction of the Google Ads, and no third party ads.  

Google Contributor effectively shut down in 2017.

Article Micropayments

Another alternative was Blendle, a so-called iTunes/Spotify/Netflix for journalism, that also launched in 2014 in the Netherlands. It let readers make micropayments for individual articles. 

It did expand to more countries, including the US and Germany. But it pivoted away from micropayments in 2019.  (The micropayment app apparently still exists, but without recent content).

Publishers are still thinking about how that could be made to work.

The view from 2025

So here we are, a decade later. Getting people to pay for published content, whether news or blogs, is still a struggle. And, no surprise, people still don't like ads. 

Did Apple change the web forever by allowing ad blockers? That turned out to be a bit hyperbolic. But they likely contributed to publishers' money woes. 

Publishers have tried to block the ad blockers, to limited success. 

A few months ago, Google launched Offerwall, which blocks loading an article until the reader completes an action, which could be a micro payment, but also could be a newsletter sign up, or viewing an ad. 

And paid newsletters on Substack and other platforms are having a moment. Publications and writers and journalists are trying to push users to pay for subscriptions in part because they can’t rely on ad revenue.

But will people just turn away when asked to pay?

A problem publishers and bloggers have is that there is so much content out there, people can just move on to the next site if they don't want to deal with a paywall. 

People are getting their news on social sites like YouTube, Facebook, X, Instagram and TikTok.

(YouTube does block users who use ad blockers, pushing people towards a Premium subscription, but individual publishers don't have the volume (and popularity) of content to do that.)

And it's not just ad blockers that are affecting publishers. 

Ever improving AI summaries discourage readers from clicking to read the original.

And there are so many news sites, and paid newsletters, and Patreons it's not possible to pay for them all, even if you want to support them. 

It costs money for people to take the time to investigate and report the news, and to write informative articles. But if people won't voluntarily pay or view ads, then it's not clear how that can be sustained. 

Maybe we'll see more and more "mainstream" news on YouTube and TikTok. Or maybe there will be an AI that fabricates content that seems correct enough to satisfy the audience. And maybe that is where we are already.

References

Shan Wang, 31 August 2015, "Anxiety is rising about the impact of ad blockers coming to iPhones and iPads with iOS 9 next month"

Julia Greenberg, WIRED, 6 September 2015, "The paradox of Apple News and iOS 9 ad-blocking" (Original version)

Jacob Davidson, 30 September 2015, "Here's how Apple could change the web forever"