“Irrelevant and excessive mobile ads annoy customers and affect their overall network experience”, Three UK’s chief marketing officer, Tom Malleschitz said.
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The buoyant mobile advertising sector has been dealt a hammer blow with the news that Hutchison Whompoa-owned Three has struck a deal with ad blocking company Shine Technologies with a view to rolling it out across the mobile operator’s European operations. But he clearly isn’t an unbiased observer, because if your mobile network bans ads then you don’t need Adblock Plus any more.
Thirdly, customers should only receive relevant ads, not ads that cause their mobile experience to be “degraded by excessive, intrusive, unwanted or irrelevant ads”. It’s nearly certain that this kind of network-level ad blocking tech will proliferate across other networks. Ad-blocking software that hides those adverts undermines that source of revenue.
Malleschitz said that the company has three core reasons for introducing the technology. For starters, customers pay for data and that data should not be used by advertisers to load ads.
Three has announced plans to cut down on intrusive mobile advertising for its users.
“Our objective in working with Shine is not to eliminate mobile advertising, which is often interesting and beneficial to our customers, but to give customers more control, choice and greater transparency over what they receive”, Three said in a statement. Three says it will also work with advertisers in order to improve the quality of mobile ads that do make their way onto your phone or tablet.
But the move has raised concerns about net neutrality, as websites which find their content being blocked due to adverts, particularly online publishers which rely on adverts for income, could refuse to allow Three access to their site. But perhaps more importantly, the operator points to dubious mobile ads that extract and exploit user data without consent.
“This trend is not confined to Three and ISBA will remain committed to finding a way through that respects consumers feelings as well as maintaining an ad funded content system, which we know consumers also want”.
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According to an Adobe-PageFair study published in August 2015, ad-blocking was estimated to cost publishers almost £15 billion a year and that there are already 198 million active ad-block users around the world.
