3 Mobile To Block Ads for 9 days in June

Trial adblocking

[jmccormac]

Seems that Three mobile is to block ads on its network as a trial for nine days in June.

[bbc.com...]

It is opt-in and will involve 500,000 of its subscribers.

Regards...jmcc

[robzilla]

What do they expect from this trial? What alternative outcome is there? Sounds more like the greasy gears of marketing at work.

advertisements count towards customers' mobile data charges, rather than advertisers shouldering the cost

The advertisements are an essential part of the free content their customers consume. They are not separate things.

some advertisers "extract and exploit" customer information

Does Three not track users and engage in remarketing? I see whole bunches of tracking scripts on their website.

customers do not always receive relevant adverts and have their browsing experience "degraded by excessive, intrusive, unwanted or irrelevant adverts"

I fail to see what a mobile service provider has to do with the relevancy of online advertising, or any internet content for that matter. This is not net neutrality, this is a service provider determining what its customers can and cannot see on the web.

They don't stand to lose much, of course, since they don't need to serve their own ads to their customers.

[jmccormac]

Looks like an attempt to see if there's any assets to be sweated. The mobile telcos seem to be rather upset at not getting any shares of the ad revenue from sites that their mobile phone users read. Thus the 500,000 sample might provide some indication as to whether it is worth hijacking the advertising on these sites and replacing it with their own is a viable source of revenue. This adblocking is not being done to benefit the users.

Regards...jmcc

[engine]

I believe it's only for one day during the period.

The key to this is the owner of Three who is an investor in the ad block company.

[jmccormac]

Dennis O'Brien of Digicel, was making noises about blocking Google and other ad networks on Digicel's networks. However Digicel does not operate in the US or highly lucrative markets so there is a bit of a motivation to engage in adblocking. I think that BT tried something similar on landlines in the UK with that Phorum software but it was found to be rather iffy from a legal standpoint.

It is a good way to get an idea of the potential revenue from the networks though.

Regards...jmcc