It's completely fair to speculate that this is Apple's true goal, but I actually do feel a little bit better about Apple doing this than, say, Facebook, or Google. The reason I feel a little bit better is that Apple at least still has an actual business model where people give them money in exchange for a product. I'm willing to be charitable and speculate that at least some of the reason Apple releases services like this is that it will cause people to continue to buy iPhones (which are wildly profitable).
If that means journalists lose revenue, they should look for other ways. Using intrusive ads as an excuse for “otherwise we don’t have money” is just dumb. They’re free to think of other ways.
The best journalism I’ve read (ftm.nl, dutch) is a subscription service and they don’t rely on ads or tracking. The sites that do this kind of tracking, in my anecdotal experience, produce shitty journalism.
If this is bad for journalism, we’ll end up in that crisis and figure out a way that doesn’t use these methods.
You want the service, you don't necessarily need it from Apple though. That's the crux of this entire argument: Apple's black-box model is terrible for the industry. Apple is opposed to any roads that don't run through taxable lands, so it should come as no surprise that they want to tear down everything that keeps the web currently working. The less functional the internet becomes, the higher pressure there is to use native apps: that's likely part of why Safari is woefully broken and outdated compared to Chrome and Firefox.
> If this is bad for journalism, we’ll end up in that crisis and figure out a way that doesn’t use these methods.
We are already in that crisis. Whenever a paywalled link crops up on Hacker News, the first comment is always an archived version for the 99% of readers who would otherwise be unable to read that. Compared to the past 15 years of reporting, that's a direct downgrade. Adding synthetic friction to the flow of information never works: games get cracked, movies get shared, shows get ripped and music gets leaked. It's nothing new, and pretending like it's somehow not going to affect the next decade of reporting seems a little disingenuous to me.
How?
That is true only if Apple competes with them, which is not the case at all.
They are a news aggregator and distributor, they are a customer of media and news agencies. Or a parasite, depending on point of view. Still not a competitor. They also still don’t compete with ad brokers and don’t do any targeted advertising.
> increasingly in the ad business itself (revenue is expected to rise to 11 billion in 2025, growing quickly)
These ads are in the Stores and keyword-based. Which is distasteful, but not quite the same level. Again, they don’t distribute ads, and are not in the market for targeted advertising. They don’t compete with ad networks, and if they weren’t doing that there would just be no ads on the store. Like it was not that long ago.
> in the exact same way digital platforms overall benefited from laying waste to the small and mid-sized ad-industry.
If the mid-sized ad industry does not rely on tracking, blocking invisible pixels in newsletter won’t affect it. If it does rely on tracking, then it can’t die soon enough.
Note: I'm not claiming that Apple is somehow a particularly bad actor in that regard. But their ads are not just keyword based. They track you, and sell access to you based on the information they collected, just like other adtech companies. Does that change your conclusions?
so it seems that the current revenue is a guess and the projection is a guess.
These small steps taken under the banner of "preserving the users' privacy" are also steps to make sure that all those clumsy users don't get offered something without giving Apple the opportunity to profit from it first.
And the only disarming response to this so far is "yeah, but that's fine for me. I WANT Apple to take control, they're the good guys with the cool products!"
But, people don't mind targeting when it is context-based, rather than user-based. Tracking is following a user or device. Context is, well, this is a website about camping, I'll pay for ads for my sleeping bags. The user isn't really part of the process, there is no tracking, just targeting which I am sure everybody is fine with if it doesn't cross the "tracking" line.
Which is of course the economic incentive that a company like Apple has to introduce these measures, it creates an asymmetry where Apple has all kinds of user information, but competitors don't.
And if you want to see the effect that declining ad revenue has on journalism you can just look at the decline of local journalism across the US as revenue shifted from advertisers to digital platforms.