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...) 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".
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.
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.)
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.
Newspapers, magazines, cable television, DVDs, movies in the theatre, all of these you pay for and yet still see ads.
Why should a product just have one revenue model? If it weren't for advertising, these products would have to charge more to generate the same revenue.
This is why I canceled cable many years ago. I was paying for it, as well as TiVo service and getting lots of ads, including ads on the shows I was watching.
In fairness, when you pay for cable you're paying for the distribution of the TV channels you watch. The programming itself is funded through ad revenue.
(Disclosure: I haven't had cable in about ten years.)
I understand what they thought they were selling me. It had no bearing on how frustrated I was sitting there thinking ``Really? I'm paying money to see this?''
Just to clarify - are iAds only supposed to be implemented on free apps? Or, in other words, is there anything stopping an app developer from including iAds in a paid app?
Also, do you think a developer would make more money with a free, iAd version over a paid app? If so, developers would obviously be more enticed to offer a free, iAd version, which would also make Apple more money (40% of iAd revenue versus 30% for paid apps).
There will always be the "high quality app" sector, and ads are simply too ugly to fit in with the carefully tailored user interfaces of the high end apps, even if Apple does make a few changes to make the ads look at least a little bit more aesthetically pleasing.
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.
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.
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.
> Readability got popular. It's a good idea so they baked it into the browser.
Also, Instapaper. Marco Arment (IP developer) once wrote that some people use IP not for articles they want to read later but for articles they want to read right now, just because it's so good at making articles readable.
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.
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!
On the other hand, if the heuristic is "pay a bunch of Mechanical Turkers five cents per website to classify typical pages from websites as 'articles' or 'not articles'" it's going to be pretty difficult to defeat.
Why bother with artificial intelligence when the real thing is so inexpensive?
Indeed, you might not even have to pay. Just build a system to report bugs. People may happily self-report when their adblocker fails to function on pages where they want it to function.
I suppose there might be tricks, like chopping your page up into misarranged divs and then unshuffling them with CSS and/or JS, that make it really hard to scrape the content for Articles, even if you know that the page should be an article. That class of hacks will cost you in accessibility, though, and they can't be great for SEO.
You can avoid any major SEO problems by only serving the modified version to iPads (As long as it's providing proper user agent information, that's easy, but there are other ways to detect it as well).
In fact, if you really want to go all out, you could just serve the entire website as a rendered image to iPad users.
You could even cut your site into tables or divs but with the table-boundaries not corresponding to the text/ad boundaries.
The possibilities are endless. I think the reason folks don't it now is that add blockers are not ubiquitous.
The only way web filtering works is if the display mechanism and the meaning of page displayed roughly correspond. If someone decides to start massively filtering the web in a way that doesn't serve the original site owner, the site owner can certainly start serving content that displays correctly but is hard to filter.
Someone might even write a Safari 5 extension which implements the reader functionality, and which is automatically updated whenever sites try to block it.
And Safari extensions loads automatically, so the user don't even have to hit the "reader" button.
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.
Sorry, but what do you mean with “would never get away with”?
Everyone’s screaming about this, it’s completely blown out of proportion and crazy conspiracy theories are formulated. That’s different to how the press reacts to Microsoft or Google – exactly, how?
Do you think that Microsoft could ship IE9 with an ad blocker installed and enabled by default? Do you think they could get away with blocking all ads except those they distribute? Or, do you think people would step in and demand regulation to stop them from doing those things?
I always thought that Microsoft could have killed Google's non-search business and other free "cloud"-based competitors by shipping an ad blocker in IE. It would have ruined Microsoft's own free online service business, but they could have thrived on software license revenue alone. But, I think the DoJ and the EU would never allow it.
> Do you think that Microsoft could ship IE9 with an ad blocker installed and enabled by default?
Reader is not an adblocker anymore than Readability or Instapaper are.
You guys are completely insane and blowing this out of proportion. Reader is a manually triggered page reformatter, essentially Readability built in, you have to already be on the page and you have to have seen the ads before Reader is even available.
The ars article is one of the few that got me to headdesk in years, it's unbelievably stupid.
I think you are comparing things which are not the same.
Ads on websites vs. ads in apps, iOS vs. Windows, Safari vs. Internet Explorer, Mobile Safari vs. Desktop Safari. All those kinds of details regulatory bodies tend to care about.
To give you just one example, Safari (the non-mobile variant, the one with the Reader feature) has at the moment a market share of around five percent, Internet Explorer has twelve times that.
Details like that matter in antitrust cases. Just because something looks superficially similar doesn’t mean it’s actually the same.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Thing is, it's not even going to do that. You have to be on the (first) page to trigger Reader, so you'll see ads anyway, and it will fetch all the pages one by one when reformatting them.
They just built Readability in the browser (literally, there are acknowledgements to Readability in Saf 5)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".