Knowing very well that close to 90% of apps on the market are ad-supported or based, Tumblr co-founder Marco Arment waged war when he launched a very popular ad blocker app for iOS and Apple products.
Ironically, he called the App “Peace”.
Well, Arment has really called for peace by pulling the very popular app from the Apple Store today! Yay!
Phew!
From a Guardian article:
Marco Arment, co-founder of Tumblr and creator of the Instapaper reading app, launched Peace on 16 September. The $2.99 app became the bestselling app in Apple’s iTunes store almost overnight.
Peace takes advantage of iOS 9, Apple’s newly updated mobile software, to filter out mobile ads and tracking on other apps and websites. Mobile advertising is the fastest growing sector of the ad business and seen by most publishers as vital to their future finances.
But mobile ads face mounting controversy with their use of “tracking” to follow users and lack of clarity over how people’s personal information is shared.
Web advertising and behavioral tracking are “out of control”, Arment wrote when he launched the app. “They’re unacceptably creepy, bloated, annoying, and insecure, and they’re getting worse at an alarming pace.”
Ad and tracker abuse is an even bigger issue on mobile than on a desktop, he said, where ads are much larger and harder to dismiss, trackers are harder to detect and they slow down page loads, drain battery power and waste cellular data. They are also “increasingly used as vectors for malware, exploits and fraud”.
Critics were quick to highlight that Arment was profiting from an app that blocked others from making money on mobile.
And after witnessing the success of the app Arment concluded that the damage to ad-supported content that would have been affected by the ad blocker was too much.
Advertisement“Achieving this much success with Peace just doesn’t feel good, which I didn’t anticipate, but probably should have,” he wrote on Friday.
“Ad blockers come with an important asterisk: while they do benefit a ton of people in major ways, they also hurt some, including many who don’t deserve the hit. Peace required that all ads be treated the same – all-or-nothing enforcement for decisions that aren’t black and white … If we’re going to effect positive change overall, a more nuanced, complex approach is required than what I can bring in a simple iOS app.”
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Jay Jay Ghatt is also editor at Techyaya.com, founder of the JayJayGhatt.com and JayJayGhatt.com where she teaches online creators how to navigate digital entrepreneurship and offers Do-It-For-You Blogging Service. She manages her lifestyle sites BellyitchBlog, Jenebaspeaks and JJBraids.com and is the founder of BlackWomenTech.com 200 Black Women in Tech On Twitter. Her biz podcast 10 Minute Podcast is available on iTunes and Player.fm. Follow her on Twitter at @Jenebaspeaks. Buy her templates over at her legal and business templates on Etsy shop!
