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One item Steve Jobs didn't mention during his presentation at WWDC on Monday is Apple Safari 5's prominent ad-blocking feature, which strips advertisements and other design elements from any web page that appears to be "an article," with apparently grim implications for online publications.
"Safari Reader removes annoying ads and other visual distractions from online articles," reads Apple's description, striking fear into the hearts of online ad sales departments. "So you get the whole story and nothing but the story."
Most browsers can block pop-up ads one way or another, and like Safari 5, several add-ons including Readability, Instapaper and Add-Art can remove web banner advertisements, interactive ads, e-mail sign-ups and navigation bars to get at the heart of a news story, even though those elements pay the bills.
To be fair, Safari 5 users must opt to remove ads manually for each page they load if they want to use the Reader feature, by clicking a button (screenshot above). That means publishers with tasteful, uncrowded designs should see fewer of their ads removed by those users, whether they're reading on iOS, Macintosh or Windows devices. Safari only has a small percentage of the overall web browser market, and obviously, this won't decimate online advertising overnight.
However, Apple's share of the U.S. smartphone market is higher -- twice that of Android and second only to RIM, according to comScore's numbers for February, the last month for which it reported smartphone market share. According to Jobs, the iPhone's web browsing share is disproportionately large, at 58 percent.
And Safari is the default browser on the iPhone and the iPad.
(Despite a widely circulated article to the contrary, Android did not actually overtake iPhone in mobile web views in April, although Android phones outsold iPhones for the first time ever last quarter, according to Gartner Research, 3.6 million to 3 million.)
Ultimately, Apple's ad blocker differs from the rest because the company also offers a protected alternative for web publishers -- the Apple App Store -- where they can publish without having their advertisements blocked.
Apple generally encourages web developers who want to offer advanced functionality to use the HTML5 standard for the web. But Apple wins when publishers develop apps specifically for its platforms and push users to those, rather than pushing them to web pages available to user's of any device with a web browser.
Guess where publications' ads won't get blocked? Inside an iOS app. And if those same publishers choose to run Apple iAds within their iPhone apps, Apple wins again, earning a 40 percent cut of resulting ad revenue -- a position in which no other ad blocker or web browser finds itself.
Yes, there's Google Chrome, now that the FTC has green-lit Google's acquisition of AdMob, but Chrome doesn't include a prominent feature for blocking ads that appear with web articles.
It may seem like a subtle move for Apple to release a browser that removes ads from the web, and of course, nobody likes reading web pages that are drowning in ads. But when Apple owns a walled garden that offers publishers refuge from web perils like ad blockers, it also seems disingenuous of the company to make the world outside of that garden more perilous for publishers.
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