Peace Ad Blocker Pulled; Advertisers Fight Back

[djbaxter]

Round 2: Peace Ad Blocker Pulled & CNET Fights Back
by Danny Sullivan
September 18, 2015

Peace rose to the top of paid apps for iPhone within hours after iOS9 launched with support for content blocking applications. Peace and other such blockers work within Safari to strip Web pages of ads and tracking scripts.

Marco Arment, who created Peace, posted today that he’s now pulled it from the app store. “Just doesn’t feel good” was the title of his post that explained that he wasn’t happy with the “all-or-nothing” approach it used

Meanwhile...

On the other side of that war have been any number of publishers and other voices raising concerns that ad blocking is robbing publications of revenue they need and that it especially hits hard at small independent ones.

The Loop noted that CNET was now targeting messages to those using ad blockers, telling them to disable the blockers to view content. The Washington Post did something similar earlier this month, before iOS9 was even released (that move had an impact on people using ad blockers with desktop browsers). “It’s going to be a bloody war,” wrote Dave Mark, of The Loop.

I’m actually seeing ads on CNET — and from Google’s ad network — despite using multiple blockers. That suggests to me that some scripts might have already changed to get around the blockers.

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