The UK mobile carrier, Three, has revealed more details about its plans to “improve” mobile advertising. Three UK will be running a 24-hour ad-blocking trial sometime during the week commencing June 13th. The trial will be opt-in and customers will be contacted to decide whether or not they want to be part of the experiment.
Three UK has a number of reasons as to why it is beginning the practice of ad-blocking on its network, and they are:
- That customers should not pay charges to receive adverts. These costs should be borne by the advertiser.
- The customers" privacy and security must be fully protected. Some advertisers use mobile ads to extract and exploit data about customers without their knowledge or consent.
- That customers should be entitled to receive advertising that is relevant and interesting to them, and not to have their data experience in mobile degraded by excessive, intrusive, unwanted or irrelevant adverts.
Aside from UK customers getting the ad-blocking functionality, Three customers in Italy will also be able to join in during the 24-hour trial period. The ad-blocking technology was developed by the Israeli company, Shine.
Three has around 9 million UK customers. The Internet Advertising Bureau has suggested Three"s move could see more publishers move to a pay-to-view model. Alex Kozloff, the IAB"s acting marketing and communications director said “The IAB believes that an ad funded internet is essential in providing revenue to publishers so they can continue to make their content, services and applications widely available at little, or no cost. We believe ad-blocking undermines this approach and could mean consumers have to pay for content they currently get for free.”
Source: Three Via: TechCrunch