Three UK to Block Ads at a Network Level

Mobile advertising is something of a hot potato.

The network has made a deal with an Israeli company called Shine that will bring mobile ad-blocking tech to the United Kingdom and Italy soon.

Ad blocking is the latest battleground for the beleaguered publishing industry.

One business case for telcos to pair with ad blockers is to use the prospect of a full implementation as a means of encouraging Google et al to volunteer some degree of revenue-share in exchange for ferrying this traffic.

It is also anxious some adverts are trying elicit customer information without their knowledge, and Three wants customers to only receive relevant advertising.

The company says it wants to give customers “more control, choice and greater transparency” over ads on their mobile devices.

Three claims that in the next few months it will work with Shine to “deliver a better, more targeted and more transparent mobile ad experience to customers”, but operations are not yet clear.

Shine’s technology is yet to be adopted by USA carriers. The company said the goal wasn’t to eliminate mobile advertising, but to get rid of certain types of ads. “There will be causalities, absolutely, but I know I’m not losing any sleep knowing remnant inventory ad networks will disappear”.

It is understood that Shine has suggested that Three follow the Digicel model, although the European operator has not decided the details of how it will use the technology.

The biggest player in the ad-banning game is cautious about service providers dealing with adverts.

Maybe not. David Meyer writing for Fortune explains that Three’s announcements may be premature, as the very mechanism of blocking ads at a network level would fall foul of the European Union net neutrality laws.

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.

Three says if you are paying for data, you should not receive adverts. Users will be able to opt in to the service.

Comment I’ve commented before that the critical mass which the subject of online ad-blocking is now reaching seems likely to presage a move away from server-based inventory advertising, where the originating URL is easy to identify and block, towards proprietary advertising served from the same origin as the website content itself. WIRED, for example, announced last week that it would block users that have an adblocker installed, instead allowing them to pay $1 per month to access an ad-free version of the site.