iAds hit the ground running

Now I don't want any of that crap on my phone.

Anyway;
Good for Apple so far 60 million this year, I betcha next year 500 million.

Yeah -- but it's not good for a lot of folks including publishers of content. If you don't mind there not being a good business model for publishers (as you've been witnessing the degrading levels of editorial and reporting in the world around you), then this doesn't matter.

But, if you do want publishers to have quality business models, then Apple's approach with iAds is a bad thing.

The problem as I see it is that people are simply lazy, greedy, entitled little bastards, as a general rule. Seriously, if people would just click a few ads once in a while, the need for so many ads in so many different places wouldn't be necessary.

I've resisted going crazy with ads on my site, but that means I make less money off my efforts. I had Google ads on my site for a brief period (one single text ad at the bottom of each post) and got so many complaints, and "I'm unsubscribing" comments that it just wasn't worth it. At the same time, I get people (not rudely, mind you) asking for more frequent updates.

I look at some of the sites I frequent, such as LoopInsight.com which has 16 graphic ad banners on the home page alone, then an extra one or two on the individual post page (on top of the 16 already showing). One article on that site has 94 words.

That's one banner ad for every five words!


Now I know Jim (the owner of LoopInsight) isn't being a greedy jerk about it, he's just trying to make a little money off his efforts. But one ad for every 5 words in that particular story just seems obscene. To be fair, that was a short article, but most of the articles on his site are brief, so even on longer articles you're probably looking at one ad for every 10 to 15 words.

The problem is that we're to blame for it. What's the number one extension downloaded for Firefox? AdBlock. Google Chrome too. And now Safari has an AdBlock extension. What's the number one complaint about a site every time they redesign? Too many ads, or the ads are "too in my face." Those are usually followed by "I block all the ads" comments from a dozen other users.

So now developers are dropping ads into their applications - and we're going to hate it. And it does suck. But we're to blame for it. If we hadn't blocked the ads on their site, and maybe clicked them once in a while, we wouldn't have this problem.