Ad-blocking becomes mainstream
Is the altruistic nature of the internet a thing of the past? Are more and more people being brainwashed into thinking that advertising is what keeps the internet working? The burden of advertising will be put under the spotlight in the coming weeks and months, thanks to an initiative by mobile operator Three UK.
Over the years, online advertising has become more and more intrusive. The industry tramples all over the notion of privacy by coming up with ever more devious ways to invade our mailboxes and online time, to track us, to profile us, to work out who our friends and relatives are, our phone numbers, addresses and places of work, and to build up dossiers on every individual who ever touches a keyboard. Whenever it is discovered that the police, MI5 or the CIA wants to monitor some of our private net activity and private lives there is, quite rightly, a howl of protest, but the advertising industry does this with impunity and misleadingly claims we get the internet for free in return.
But anyone using a mobile phone connection with a metered tariff knows access isn't free. Pages bloated with adverts not only significantly slow down page load times, but can also seriously eat into your monthly usage allowances. The mobile service providers have also been vocal about the burden of page advertising and the head of marketing at Three UK, Tom Malleschitz, said "Irrelevant and excessive mobile ads annoy customers and affect their overall network experience. We don't believe customers should have to pay for data usage driven by mobile ads."
Three UK has now introduced network-level advert blocking technology using a product called Shine. Unlike many existing products such as AdBlocker and Ublock, Shine is technology which runs on the service provider's routers and blocks adverts before they ever get near the end-user. All of Three's customers benefit from greatly-reduced advertising without having to do any configuration at all.
So far Three, which is owned by Hutchinson, has implemented Shine on its UK network, where it has about 8 million users, and in Italy. It also operates mobile phone networks in Ireland, Austria, Denmark and Sweden, and if the UK trials prove successful, will likely roll out the product to those other countries as well.
The advertising industry can shrug its shoulders and say 8 million subscribers is hardly world-changing on the global scale, but they must realise this is a significant foothold for ad-blocking in Europe. Shine was also implemented by Digicell in the Caribbean and South Pacific regions last September, and no doubt other carriers worldwide are also talking to Shine and watching Three's experiment closely, and the impact on its customer base.
The advertising industry will likely take a two-pronged attack to Shine. On the one hand it will attempt to find ways to camouflage its adverts and circumvent the Shine filters, and on the other hand, it will probably try to block users on Shine-protected networks or instead deliver impoverished content so that end users protest that ad blocking is breaking pages.
24th February 2016
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.