Whether it's ChatGPT coming to the iPhone or Siri porting a smarter brain, AI will almost certainly be the highlight of iOS 18. However, in addition to AI, iOS 18 may have an update that many users will be happy about. A few days ago, a relevant source revealed that Apple is preparing to add an AI-based privacy feature to Safari in iOS 18, which can remove ads or other unwanted website content.
Safari helps users to actively block ads, which is undoubtedly a feature that can excite many users. After all, for most people, ads are a non-essential thing to watch, but for organizations that rely on ads to make money, this new feature in iOS 18 is nothing less than a powerful version of the original App Tracking Transparency.
As a result, the News Media Association (NMA), which represents the interests of British newspaper publishers, took the lead and expressed concern to Apple's head of government affairs in the UK, saying that the feature would affect the news media industry's online revenue.
In addition to emphasizing the critical role that advertising plays in supporting journalism, the NMA also stressed that any reduction in advertising revenue could seriously damage the financial sustainability of the institutions involved. To that end, the NMA has called for a meeting with Apple and news outlets and publishers to discuss the possible impact of the feature.
For the news and publishing industry, reaching readers through websites is undoubtedly the way to survive in the current decline of traditional print media, and digital advertising is one of the key factors to maintain the operation of news and publishing organizations.
In order to get more revenue, the war between news outlets and tech giants over content has spread from Australia to North America and then to Europe. Google and Meta have already gotten into such a fuss because they haven't agreed on a share ratio with news outlets, and this iOS 18's AI-based ad blocking will naturally make the latter jump even more, especially for British media outlets that rely heavily on digital advertising.
That's right, the business model of overseas media has changed dramatically from a decade ago, and the "hard paywall" is gradually being abandoned by the media.
In the early days of the Internetization of news media, the inertia of the paper media era was continued, and the paid reading model was pursued. However, time has passed, and overseas media outlets such as Time and Insider have begun to "tear down the wall" and reduce the number of articles in their paygates, so as to release more content to expand the readership, so that more users who would not have visited their websites before can discover great content, and through more reading by users, they hope to increase the revenue of commercial advertising.
The advantage of using advertising as the core of revenue over paywalls is also clear: news outlets no longer need to worry about content not being able to conquer users. That's right, in the era of paywalls, news media followed a content payment model, and after switching to digital advertising, the gameplay became more like Internet companies. In the words of the developers of AdGuard, the world's leading ad-blocking tool, "Ads are so lucrative that any subscription revenue is extremely difficult to match, or even compensate for." ”
According to the statistics of relevant agencies, the United Kingdom is the most important market in the field of digital advertising in Europe, with a market share of 33.14%, and it is also the country with the highest penetration rate of digital advertising in Europe, with digital advertising accounting for 73% of the entire advertising market. Considering that iPhone users account for almost 50% of the total number of iPhone users in the UK, this means that the loss of iPhone users is an unacceptable thing for local media. That's why the NMA, which represents the interests of British newspaper publishers, is so sensitive, and has already begun to act before iOS 18 is officially released and the ad blocking feature is just breaking the news.
The next question is whether the ad-blocking feature brought by iOS 18 to Safari will be implemented as expected after the NMA starts to act. Although the situation in overseas markets is difficult to say, in China, there is a high probability that this feature will not be launched, because judging from the court judgments in the past few years, products that use the ad blocking function will basically be regarded as unfair competition. For example, Mango TV sued "Blocking Elf" for unfair competition, and Tencent forced the advertising skip service software "Li Hop" to stop updating indefinitely in the name of unfair competition.
If it is said that due to the difference in technical principles, "Li Jumping" does not block ads, but uses the mechanism of the mobile phone operating system to automatically skip ads, so it is difficult to be regarded as unfair competition, but at present, the vast majority of ad blocking tools and Internet products that block ads are in competition. For the Internet business model of "free + subsidy", consumers' "free" access to Internet services implies that they should pay certain benefits to make up for the costs of Internet manufacturers.
The news media generates news for readers to watch for free, and readers watch advertisements to bring revenue to the media, which is a model of taking what you want. Ad-blocking tools are clearly aware of the user's mindset of not wanting to see ads and not paying to watch content, and the damage that blocking ads can cause to Internet vendors. Therefore, free reading with advertising display is the current business model of news media, if no one reads the advertisement, then the news will obviously not be able to watch for free in the future, and the ultimate damage is still consumers.
In short, digital advertising accounts for a significant portion of the UK's news outlets, and allowing iOS 18 to bring similar ad-blocking features to Safari could make their business model unsustainable. In fact, it is the same in the domestic market, a large number of Internet products are maintained by advertising, and the browser supports advertising blocking, which can make users comfortable, but the price is that the living space of a large number of Internet products is compressed.