Mobile ads have been getting more and more popular over the last several years. With millions of people moving away from PCs and toward mobile devices, marketers have been increasing their ad budgets in this area. One nice thing about mobile advertising is that people didn’t really have the ability to block the ads like they do on their PCs. That, however, is coming to an end.
When Apple launches their new iOS version (iOS 9) it will come with the ability to block advertisements within Safari. You’ll also be able to block cookies, trackers and other items commonly used by marketers to learn more about their customers.
The beta version of the operating system that was released to developers included this new option to block a variety of content and apparently it is working quite well.
The Apple developer blog reported, “The new Safari release brings Content Blocking Safari Extensions to iOS. Content Blocking gives your extensions a fast and efficient way to block cookies, images, resources, pop-ups and other content.”
Content Blocking has been available for quite some time in Safari, but only on the full PC version. Pushing it into the mobile version could have some significant implications for marketers. Ads on mobile devices are very important for many marketing strategies and when people are able to quickly block them with a simple setting it could severely limit the ability to use this type of advertisement.
Of course, if a sufficient percentage of people block the ads, it could also drive the price of mobile advertising up due to the reduced supply of open ad inventory.
iOS 9 is likely to be pushed out to users sometime in September, likely right around the time the new iPhone 6S (or 7, depending on which rumors you believe) is released. The announcement for the new iPhone is going to occur on September 9th.
