Copyright © Emerce 2023

British publishers fear missing out on hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising money if Apple soon updates iOS. The new version of the OS presumably contains a radical adblocker.

The concerns about this were conveyed to Apple last Friday by the hundreds of companies through their advocacy group News Media Association. So reports the Financial Times, which had access to the letter.

The inconvenience is about a new feature in Apple's iOS18. That is the operating system for iPhones, which have a 52 percent market share in the UK.

'Web Eraser,' as the feature is called, allows users to selectively exclude blocks of information from a Web site. The iPhone owner no longer gets to see those blocks until he unblocks them. Publishers fear that consumers will use that iOS feature to brush off advertising. Incidentally, Apple has not yet made anything public about this.

Advertisers spent 34 billion euros on online advertising in the United Kingdom last year. Most of that, 56 percent, went to mobile advertising.

Photo: Yukiko Matsuoka (cc)

© The Content Exchange, source News