Posted by cdrnsf 21 hours ago
And does it block ads on Apple News?
To block ads on Apple News you need to block iadsdk.apple.com in DNS. E.g., NextDNS
That's because they know that in Apple News+ you are the product and their profit lowers if you block their ads by disabling the app.
Apple using Taboola is so hysterical because of their claim to focus on user experience. Taboola ads are a chumbox of the absolute worst bullshit ads on the market. The only thing worse is the zergnet stuff.
I own multiple personal Mac computers, an iPhone, an Apple Watch, iPad Pro, a few HomePods, and a few Apple TV devices. I’ve already proven that I’m willing to pay for a product even when there are cheaper alternatives. Why they decided to make News a paid subscription with ads — especially low-quality ads is beyond me.
I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve deleted the News, Stocks, and Weather apps, and will just remove any additional apps they decide to chuck in. It’s a real shame their aggressive pursuit of services revenue is destroying what is a great hardware ecosystem.
I don’t see ads on the weather app (at least on my phone)
-- Tim "Apple" Cook (paraphrased)
Actual quote from a few days ago:
> “Services also achieved an all-time revenue record, up 14 percent from a year ago [...] a testament to incredible customer satisfaction for the very best products and services in the world.”
Those two words definitely don't belong together.
I truly don't believe that there is enough legitimate advertisers willing to buy ad space in Apple News (or elsewhere) to generate to profit Apple expects.
Scams, you see, make more profit per customer, and thus can afford to spend more on ads per customer. This creates an upward pressure on ad prices, on top of the extra ads sold.
This is why abuse prevention at major ad platforms is so consistently lackluster. They want to stop some scams, the most obvious and and the most illegal kind, so that they can say they tried - including to regulators, and to major companies that also buy ads from them and don't want their ads next to penis enlargement pills. But actually stopping all fraud and scams could cut into their profits in a meaningful way. So there's no hurry to build better ad quality control systems, not at all. Actively staying on top of ad fraud is paying more money to make less money.
Facebook is a major example of this kind of dynamic in action. They actually had internal estimates of how much it would cut their revenue to get rid of the majority of fraud, and were silly enough to put them in the writing.