Taboola + Apple News

Om Malik: Taboola + Apple News? No thanks

For an extra couple of dollars, I could get Apple News+, so I thought why not. That ended today, when I learned that Apple had struck a deal with Taboola, a company known for serving low-quality ads next to web content. I decided to cut bait.

I guess Apple’s committment to user is trumped (pardon the pun) by its committment to maximize dollars.

I always found Taboola advertising more than just junk. They are trash. Literal garbage. And I am happy that ad blockers block them.

Werd I/O commenting on Taboola + Apple News? No thanks:

For many news publishers Apple News pageviews are a multiple of the reads on their own websites: it’s a serious source of traffic and impact. The fact that Apple is finding itself having to make changes to how it makes revenue on the platform means that the mechanism itself may be under threat.

In the context where here in Canada, the industry has written bill C-18 to tax linking to news source (and everything the dismissed expert said would happen is happening), this raises even more question.

I have never really used Apple News, and really declined the offer for a trial. Actually I hate when a link open in the app instead of the web browser; iOS has pretty weak ad blocking, not dissimilar to what Google pushes with Chrome, but Apple News is completely immune to it.