Ad blocking is the Internet industry’s biggest nightmare: it blocks the ads that appear on your page at the server level. Translation: An ad that’s served but not seen is still an impression, and thus paid for, but an ad that is not even served at all, doesn’t count for anything.
And now the default web browser of the world’s most popular phone, Safari on Apple iPhone’s iOS9, has ad blocking pre-installed. Google, Facebook, and Twitter make money by showing advertising to their users. No advertising, no money, no Google, no Facebook, and no Twitter. Beyond that though, one of the reasons that we use these tools is to consume content and most content creators make money through advertising. And thus, not only is the trunk of the internet tree being threatened, but so are the leaves. However, the trunk (the large digital platforms), for now, have figured out different ways to monetize. It’s the leaves, the publishers, that we need to worry about…
