Rush Limbaugh: What Apple’s iOS 9 ad-blockers will unleash

Mac Daily News ^ | September 21, 2015 | by Rush Limbaugh

[Swordmaker]

Rush Limbaugh: What Apple’s iOS 9 ad-blockers will unleash

Monday, September 21, 2015 · 5:34 pm ·

Among other things during his radio program, Mac, iPhone, and iPad user Rush Limbaugh on Monday discussed Apple’s iOS 9 for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, specifically content- or ad-blockers and what he thinks is Apple’s reasoning and what will result.

The 3-hour Rush Limbaugh Show, the highest-rated, most-listened-to talk-radio program in the United States with some 15 million weekly listeners, airs daily on a network of approximately 590 AM and FM affiliate radio stations. The program is also broadcast worldwide on the U.S. Armed Forces Radio Network.

From the live on-air transcript:

…Folks, look, on an iPhone, particularly a smartphone, when you have a website that takes 45 seconds to load everything, I mean, things you don’t even see being loaded, the trackers you don’t see. You see the video player being loaded, you see the ads being loaded, but there’s much, much more. All the trackers and the analytics from Google that are being loaded on these websites, you never see it, but it’s why your bar never finishes for 45. You can read what’s on the website maybe within 20 seconds, but your battery is churning for that full minute while all this stuff is loaded. And sometimes the content doesn’t load fully until all these things do.

And then you’re shown how you can have every website you visit load in 10 seconds? What are you gonna do? So the genie is out of the bottle… White listing is not gonna solve the problem. The genie’s out of the bottle. So what’s gonna happen, this guy is exactly right, the consumer is gonna determine what happens here, and the advertisers, Madison Avenue is not just gonna sit there and say, “Oops, we have been snookered.” What’s gonna happen is there are gonna be all kinds of creativity. We’ve already led the way here in radio years ago on this. We are truly the trailblazers. What’s gonna happen next online is advertising is not gonna look like advertising. And it’s not gonna have pictures. It’s gonna present to you as a news story.

Creative writers are gonna write stories about a product or that you’re gonna think is a review or maybe somebody really recommending, when in fact it’s gonna be an ad. And it can’t be blocked because traditional blockers haven’t yet been written to block that kind. Or they’ll come up with some way of disguising what looks like content as an ad, in order to get past the blockers. I mean, too many people are depending on this revenue, too many websites.

I would have to say the top reason that Apple is doing this, and this is my wild guess based on things that I’ve studied and read. Steve Jobs, before he died, declared back in the days when Apple only — I say only. Their cash reserve was $40 billion. Now they’re over $200 billion. Back when they had $40 billion — and it was still more than anybody else had — Jobs said he would spend all of it to destroy Google. He said he was ready for thermonuclear war. The reason was Android, he believed, was stolen from iOS. Eric Schmidt used to be on the Apple board. He was on the Apple board when the iPhone first came out in 2007. If you look at Google’s Android phones around then they were clunkers. They had keyboards, hard button keyboards on them. They were nothing like what the iPhone is or any other smartphone today.

Shortly after that Google announces they’re totally redoing their phones and Android phones begin to look just like iPhones, as Samsung’s did, and Jobs was not mad at Samsung — well he was, but the focus of his anger was Google. Well, Google’s primary source of revenue is advertising sales all over the Internet. And the best way, the fastest way to launch an attack on Google is content blockers, ad blockers on Apple because the percentage of iOS users in the developed world, with customers that spend money, is an overwhelming percentage using Apple’s iOS. So if Google sees a severe decline in revenue from iOS devices, iPhones, iPads, and all that, it would be a huge chunk out of their revenue stream. I think that’s among whatever other reasons there are for this, that’s one of the big ones.

…This is a direct assault on the income streams of a lot of people. Internet service providers and website operators are kind of operating at a — I don’t know if you call it a disadvantage or not, but the Internet, from its earliest days, content was free. And it became expected that everything on the Internet is free, including streamed video, music, textual content, whatever it is, it’s supposed to be free. It’s always been free… So they’ve got big problems. Content blockers coming along and attacking the only revenue source they’ve really been able to depend on is gonna cause major upheavals. And as I say, the way it’s gonna manifest itself is these advertisers and their agencies are gonna try to come up new ways to have their advertising presented to you, disguised as news stories or, who knows, contests, promotions, you name it. But whoever comes up with the most creative way of getting around the blockers is gonna get rich. It’s the way it always happens in America, while America’s still America, so act fast.

Full transcript here.

[Scutter]

I have an iPad Air. Can that run iOS 9?

YUP!

Ok, excellent. Man, I can't wait. Thanks for the info.

[Scutter]

Just installed Crystal Ad Blocker and then went to Breitbart.com to test it out. Awesome awesome awesome!

[Cincinatus]

I wasn't referring to Rush's Apple talk -- I was referring to his Lifelock infomercials inserted into his 3rd hour programming, passed off as "part of" the program (and included as program in podcast downloads, which are allegedly commercial free)

But in true FReeper fashion, you immediately jump to an unwarranted conclusion. Thanks for the dialog.

[Eric Pode of Croydon]

Ghostery highlights the various advertising and demographic "trackers" which many websites run in the background, slowing loading as well as creating privacy concerns.

The newer versions of Firefox can do this through a menu setting, but I prefer the detail view Ghostery provides.

[csvset]

I would also suggest NoScript for FireFox, in addition to Ghostery and AdBlock.

[dennisw]

Thanks! I did install Ghostery yesterday on your recommendation. I like it. It blocks certain trackers. Why give your info to these people! Now Ghostery is blocking some or most.
I put Ghostery on maximum blocking for cookies and trackers

Ad Block Plus is also great..... My websites are loading faster. PLUS less memory is being used up by these advertisements. I see the amount of memory being used by Firefox in my windows task manager (Windows 7)

[dennisw]

I will do the same as you and rely on Ghostery for this task

[Swordmaker]

I wasn't referring to Rush's Apple talk -- I was referring to his Lifelock infomercials inserted into his 3rd hour programming, passed off as "part of" the program (and included as program in podcast downloads, which are allegedly commercial free)

Those are not "passed off" as part of the programing. You just missed the segues from programing to advertisement because they are spoken by the person who is doing the airtime. Rush, Mark Levin, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Brian Sussman, Tom Sullivan, Larry King, George Noory, all of them advertise for Lifelock or one of the other Identity security companies the same way, segueing into and out of the commercial smoothly. There really is no way to do this type of radio ad differently. There's no background music to run in it. It is the time honored way professional radio announcers do advertising in talk radio.

I jumped to no conclusion. You inserted your comment criticizing Rush in an thread about Rush talking about Apple. . . and others have complained that Rush "advertises for Apple" as a paid shill.

Thanks for your dialogue.