I've been following the iOS ad blocking debate and have come to this uninteresting conclusion: Everyone is right. News organizations' sites suck when they load over 10MB of cruft to display 10KB of article text. Blocking ads reduces revenue and will lead to an ad-blocker-blocker and ad-blocker-blocker-blocker arms race (which has already started). And we still don't have micropayments.
The approach we're taking for Recent News on iOS is to support a reader view but show the ads by default. Blocking ads by switching to reader view takes an extra tap after the news article is loaded.
This seems to be a reasonable balance between giving our users what they want and supporting good journalism. Directing our users to excellent news articles has been one of our goals in creating Recent News; we're the first news app (that I'm aware of, at least) to use article quality as an input to our recommendation engine.
We've posted more about the details of our approach here. If you have any thoughts, including about how to approach this on our Android app, let me know!
Declan McCullagh is the co-founder and CEO of Recent, a startup that aims to transform mobile news reading through artificial intelligence. He lives on the San Francisco peninsula.
