Your website ad revenue might be in serious trouble. See Apple’s Ad-Blocking Feature Is Sending Publishers Scrambling.

IOS 9, which is set for a Sept. 16 release, will allow owners of Apple’s newer mobile devices to download Web browser extensions that can block advertising from being shown while they browse the Web.

This is yet another gut check on the ad-supported content model. Since Apple devices account for a lot of traffic on many publisher sites, this change in Apple’s operating system could mean a steep drop in ad revenue.

Ad-blocking isn’t a new thing, but it’s becoming more popular with users, partially because ads have become more and more annoying.

It was somewhat inevitable. The point of an ad is to distract you from what you’re trying to do — e.g., read an article — and go do something else. People have learned to ignore ads, so the advertisers have had to create more intrusive ads — they’re called “high impact” ads — to get the reader’s attention.

Publishers may empathize with their visitors’ concern over ads, but they also need to make money off their content, so many of them are looking for ways to beat the ad blockers.

Here’s an article that explains the situation very well. How ad blocking will change digital advertising.

It seems as if the battle will rage back and forth — with visitors trying to ignore the ads while publishers desperately look for new ways to serve them — but some publishers have stopped to ask if there might be a better way to monetize their online content.

Carolyn Morgan gives ten ideas for how publishers can side-step ad blockers, and none of them involve technology tricks to force unwanted ads on visitors. She reminds us there are other ways to monetize content than to sell ads against it, and publishers should make sure to keep those options in mind.

More than that, publishers should be constantly testing different monetization strategies. Some readers might be more amenable to registering for access, while others might gladly pay for a longer treatment of the topic. It’s not wise to limit your revenue to one stream.

Unfortunately, many publishers have structural barriers to this kind of revenue agnosticism. The ad team makes their money by selling ads, and they have no incentive to promote other revenue generators, like getting email sign-ups or selling a PDF download.

Such self-defeating structures need to be removed, and the company has to look at all of its revenue options. This would be true even if there was no threat to ad revenue, but with the prospect of a steep decline, if you aren’t ready to move quickly to another model, you might not survive.