Ad blockers top Apple Charts as iOS 9 Debuts

Ad-Blocking – Top of Apple’s Store Charts

Following the recent launch of iOS 9, ad-blocking apps have gone to the top of Apple’s Store charts. According to App Annie, mobile analytics firm, a $2.99 app, Peach that tends to block` most ads as well as privacy invading trackers on web pages seem to be the top paid app in the App Store.

 Purify Blocker; a $3.99 app is at No 4 on the paid apps chart, while a 99 cent Blockr app is No. 17 on the charts. The sudden interest in ad blockers is due to Apple’s new iOS 9, software which tend to power iPads and iPhones adds features that enable the Safari Web browser to tap into content blocking from third party apps.

Users could just install this type of an app and set Safari to use it in order to block advertisements as well as similar content while surfing the web. Ads can be offending spot for people surfing the Internet and blocking ads helps users in quickening the Web performance as well as keeping ads from coming up on the screen. Advertisers tend to use ads in order to generate income and several websites which are free depend on ads to get some revenue.

Ads on Web- Intrusive/Annoying/Trespassing on Privacy

Arnent, Peace developer is known for his creation of Instapaper, an app which enables readers to save articles for offline reading and often strips ads in the process. He had partnered with ad blocking company, Ghostery, for Peace, that gives the app the benefit of a well-established database. Besides ad blocking, Peace also disables slow loading fonts, blocks social widgets as well as hides common sections towards the bottom of the sites and includes a straightforward feature for whitelisting sites.

The counter debate from the user point of view is that several ads on the Web seem to be intrusive and annoying, trespassing on privacy. Advertisements tend to use video, animation and other techniques to draw the attention of the audience.

 However, the privacy issue seems to be one of the most important with people very much concerned over the data collected by advertisers. Marco Arment, developer of Peace has mentioned in a blog post recently that `web advertising and behavioural tracking is getting out of control.

Flare-up of Ads blocking – Bitter debate

They are unacceptably creepy, bloated, annoying and insecure and seem to be getting worse at alarming pace’. He states that people who use ad blockers should not feel guilt-ridden that they could be offending advertisers and websites which depend on ad revenue.

 He add that if publishers prefer to offer free content funded by advertising, the burden is on them to choose ad content as well as methods in which readers would tolerate and respond. By integrating ad blocking, Apple the California based company is clearly supporting the users. We need to now wait and watch on the reaction of the advertisers.

 Publishers are envisaging a growing percentage of their web traffic from smartphones, however, mobile ads seems to be making much less revenue than those on desktop and till now, only desktop browsers have good or reliable potentials to block ads.

This flare-up in popularity of blocking ads has given rise to bitter ethics debate between those who view them as an existential threat to the free Internet and those who are fed up of barrages of horrible and at times harmful ads and arrays of trackers who tend to trace their online movements to target ads better.