With yesterday's release of iOS 9 to the masses, Content Blockers (a.k.a. ad blockers) have made their way into the iOS mainstream. As I recently said, as both a reader and publisher of web content I'm happy about this.
Part of what I'm happy about is the change this will bring to our industry as a whole. I'm also happy about some of the specific changes it will bring to TMO.
Ad blockers are, of course, a slippery slope. It's easy to start by saying, "well, I'm going to use it on sites that are egregious with the amount of ads and trackers and pop-up windows they use." Once enabled, though, ad blockers will block everything everywhere. Sure, you can whitelist your favorite sites, but I have a feeling the majority of folks won't bother to do that. Most will take the Ronco-style set-it-and-forget-it path.
This is where it gets dangerous: Blocking every bit of advertising and then doing nothing to pay for the content you read on a daily basis will naturally erode away at the web. You already know this, of course, I'm just pointing it out to set up a question.
Now that you have the ability to easily run content blockers on both your desktop and mobile browsers, what will it take for you to stop using them? What changes do your favorite sites — including TMO, specifically — need to make until you no longer feel the need to run a content blocker at all?
We have our own ideas for these answers and, as I mentioned in my original piece on the subject, we routinely re-examine and iterate upon our monetization methods to balance your experience with our need to successfully fund a business. That's as it always has been and this will continue here at TMO.
So it's with that in mind that I leave you with my question: Now that you have your ad blocker in place, what will it take for you to disable it?