wolfe with an e's blog
Review: 1Blocker for iOS. ★★★★★
This review is short. The reason for writing it is not.
The reality is that we pay for websites to exist. All those annoying ads are what fund the content. In order to make a living and support a staff, the site either advertises something they have to sell or something others have to sell. The problem is that when advertising so voraciously interferes with the content, a website is no longer useful to the reader. You tolerate the frustration at best and part ways and talk smack about the site at worst. Pop-ups, pop-overs, pop-unders, delay screens, banner ads, self-playing video spots or ads placed in the middle of a content block are all poorly designed to grab your attention in order to get you to click. And even Scott Cunningham (Senior VP at the Interactive Advertising Bureau) admits * “Looking back now, our scraping of dimes may have cost us dollars in consumer loyalty.”*
Creepy tracking aside, many sites trashed their worth to their reader with an overabundance of ads.
1Blocker to the rescue.
Ad blockers work in Safari on iOS to turn off the ads and add-related technology, like tracking cookies. 1Blocker was one of the first and continues to be one of the simplest and most effective ad blockers for iOS. It’s infinitely configurable, so if you actually find the ads on a particular site useful you can whitelist it. This gives control of your web experience back to you.
And the good guys suffer.
Unfortunately with the birth of ad blockers, every site is paying for the abuses of the few (well, the few million.) There are many sites out there that do ads reasonably. For example, John Gruber’s Daring Fireball blog uses a tiny ad that’s relevant to his readers. It doesn’t interfere with the enjoyment of his content at all. But some of the ad-blockers want to defeat this as well. (My personal thought is that if someone paid for an ad blocker, they probably never click on an ad anyway.)
Added bonus: Improving speed.
Maybe an even more practical reason for getting 1Blocker is that it effectively allows you to eliminate other unwanted content that sites push on your browser. By filtering out the ads and associated technology you can speed up browsing and reduce data by about 50% with 1Blocker. But you can also take things further by filtering out social widgets, custom fonts, comments and even ignore CSS page elements. So if you hit the same sites on a regular basis, you can customize your visit to only show the elements you want, speed up page loading and minimize data even more. You can go to all that trouble if you want to, or you can just let 1Blocker automatically do its thing.
