I wrote yesterday about how to use ad blockers in iOS 9, and I explained my feeling about the question of whether one should block ads or not. It’s not a question with an easy answer.
Marco Arment, who’s Peace ad-blocker shot to the top of the charts, today decided to pull the app from the App Store. In a blog post, Marco says:
Achieving this much success with Peace just doesn’t feel good, which I didn’t anticipate, but probably should have. Ad blockers come with an important asterisk: while they do benefit a ton of people in major ways, they also hurt some, including many who don’t deserve the hit.
This is a delicate situation. We’re being inundated by very bad and intrusive ads, yet we still want to support website whose content we read. It’s going to take a real shake-up for this to be settled, and ad-blockers on mobile devices will probably lead to new ways of monetizing websites.