Ad blocking war heats up as blockers top the App Store, some publishers fight back by hiding content from people using blockers
Round 2: Peace Ad Blocker Pulled & CNET Fights Back — The revolution in ad blocking that was ushered in with iOS 9 has seen its first pushback.
Context & Ripple Effects
iOS 9's support for content blockers turned ad suppression into a mainstream consumer act within days, with blockers briefly topping the App Store charts before demand cooled. The backlash was immediate on both sides: Marco Arment pulled the top-charting Peace app, while publishers like CNET began hiding content from readers detected as using blockers.
The fight is not just publishers versus users — it runs through the platforms and trade bodies. Independent publishers were already caught between Google, Apple, and Facebook in the ad-revenue war per The Verge's earlier coverage, and now the IAB is organizing a collective response while Adblock Plus owner Eyeo moves to monetize its whitelist through deals like the flat monthly fee offered to the iOS blocker Crystal.
First-order effects
- CNET and other publishers restricting access force ad-blocking readers into an immediate choice between disabling their blocker or losing the content entirely.
- Blocker developers face direct market consequences: Peace's removal from the App Store shows top-charting visibility now attracts ethical and public pressure that can end a product overnight.
Second-order effects
- The IAB's new Ad Blocking Working Group plans to distribute detection code to members, turning what began as individual publisher scripts into coordinated industry infrastructure against blockers.
- Eyeo's paid-whitelist deal with Crystal signals a parallel track where blocking itself becomes monetized — acceptance money reshaping which ads survive rather than whether ads appear.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward enforcement migrating from publishers' own sites to the platforms that control distribution — a trajectory later confirmed when YouTube's crackdown drove record ad-blocker uninstalls, showing platform action outweighs consumer tooling.
- If circumvention vendors like Admiral, raised $2.5M to defeat ad-blockers, keep winning funding, the industry settles into a permanent arms-race economy of detection and counter-detection layered onto publishing economics.
The trend: The ad-blocking conflict of 2015 is one data point in a longer shift from consumer-side tools deciding web economics to platforms and industry bodies enforcing them through whitelists, detection code, and distribution chokepoints.