Adblockers and the Media

Apologies if my thoughts seem a bit scattered. A very busy Monday.

Dan Primack wrote a scathing piece this weekend that you can read here. I’ve been reading Dan’s work for over a decade and while I don’t always agree with him, he frequently presents well-thought out arguments. The synopsis is that by allowing third parties to create adblockers for iOS9 that Apple is in effect stealing from the media. Surely his goal is to create a reaction and drive viewers to his work, but I disagree with his stance.

For the last 10 years we’ve been hearing folks in print media saying “You need newspapers! You need newspapers!” yet no one has ever generated a response for why we need newspapers. All over the world people stopped buying newspapers because they were “old news” by the time it showed up on your doorstep, and horribly inconvenient to read when compared to the web. We all know how this has turned out for newspapers. But has this made us worse off? Of course not. Bloggers may be quicker to put a story out without fact checking, but they rely on their reputation just as much as any media outlet. Online news outlets have been great and with Twitter, we receive news (and updates) as its happening.

What Dan’s article says to me is that the prevailing thought in the media is that they still don’t want to change. If you have a good product, someone will always be willing to pay for it. Maybe Fortune goes to a pay model, like the WSJ and NYT and doesn’t have to worry about adblockers. Maybe the industry develops a consortium to create technology that bypasses adblockers. Whatever it is, the point is that the media has done a horrific job of finding ways to monetize it’s work, and even after the demise of print, they still do a horrible job of finding ways to monetize its work.

Any industry that fights technological advancement might as well seal its own fate. Either evolve or die.

It’s also amazing that Apple is the lighting rod for adblockers. Chrome has allowed these plugins for years, and it works terrifically. Why was their no uproar? Apparently because Apples marketing is so successful (think about how many products/features Google has had before Apple, yet no one knew about them). 3 of the top 4 apps in the App Store were adblockers. I guess that will get people’s attention.