Just after Apple announced its iPhone 4 and iOS 4 at its Worldwide Developers Conference, the company quietly released Safari 5. Instead of focusing on useless cosmetics (I’m looking at you Safari 4), this release pays close attention to things that matter: Speed increases, standards compliance, a walled-garden extensions system, and Safari Reader. This last item, Safari Reader, is sure to garner the attention of online publishers.
At least Apple is straight up about the purpose of Safari Reader: “Safari Reader removes annoying ads and other visual distractions from online articles. So you get the whole story and nothing but the story.” As a reader, I love it; as a publisher, well, there goes the CPM ad model.
That’s not much of a problem for ARTS & FARCES but more traditional publishers may have a problem. Those articles spread unnecessarily over 11 pages only to garner 11 pageviews and 11 pages full of ads? They’re gone for good. Publishers of advertising-supported long-form content (articles spread necessarily over 11 pages) have reason for worry.
Although Clint Ecker, writing for Ars Technica reports, “it does a full, real request on every single page. The publication sees all the pageviews on every page and even ad frames get downloaded for each pageview, which could quell some publisher worries.” Doubtful. Advertisers aren’t going to pay for ads that they know are downloaded but not displayed.
The likely outcome—almost certainly highly choreographed by Apple—is to attempt to migrate publishers from the open web to closed apps. Contrary to what Eliot Van Buskirk reports for Wired, in my experience all ads are automatically stripped in Safari Reader; no user intervention required.
Apple’s market share for desktop web browsers is pitifully small, at about five percent, but its smartphone share is almost three times as large as Google’s Android and within 17 percent of RIM’s Blackberry. As Van Buskirk writes, “Guess where publications’ ads won’t get blocked? Inside an iOS app. And if those same publishers choose to run Apple iAds within their iPhone apps, Apple wins again, earning a 40 percent cut of resulting ad revenue—a position in which no other ad blocker or web browser finds itself.”
At the same time Apple is aggressively selling its iAds advertising platform (hey publishers, ads in apps are unblockable) as a core component of its iOS mobile operating system, the company is adding ad-blocking technology to its web browser where—wait for it—it has no advertising platform. Genius or hypocritical? I say hypocritical unless Apple allows users to block its iAds.
Out of one side of its corporate mouth, Apple touts the open web and HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript but actively modifies publishers’ web presentation and blocking their supporting ads. Out of the other side is talk of Apple’s “curation:” a closed, walled garden where it’s Apple’s way or the highway.
Safari Reader is based on code for Readability, an Arc90 Labs open-source Apache project. Because the Apache 2 license doesn’t require code contributions back to the community, Apple—of course—didn’t. Readabiliy is JavaScript that works in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari and allows the user to customize typeface, margin, and size. Safari Reader doesn’t allow any customization, only increasing or decreasing the size of the display port.
For user experience professionals, there’s another stunningly clear message from Apple: Your website designs are failing your users miserably. Good web design focuses the user’s attention on the single most important piece of content. That’s precisely what Safari Reader does; no Twitter feeds, no most recent comments, and no most emailed articles. Just what matters. Will there be a backlash from visual designers? Probably. But I’m certain similar features will appear in the other major browsers sooner rather than later.
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