Wireless carrier Three announced in February that it would start blocking mobile ads. The United Kingdom company reported on May 27, Friday that it will offer 500,000 customers the chance to opt in for software testing that will start next month. Three announced various reasons for blocking ads including effects on data charges.
In February Three reported that it will provide its customers with more control, choice, and transparency about mobile ads, according to BBC. However, the UK's Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) stated that the telecommunications company's plan was too broad.
Three now has plans to perform a one-day opt-in trial sometime between June 13 and 20. It has stated there are various reasons it supports ad blockers.
One is that that some advertisers exploit customer information. Another reason for exploring ad-blocking is that sometimes customers get advertisements that are not relevant to their browsing experience.
However, the company stated that data charges were the main reason for adding ad-blocking to mobile devices. For example, since advertisers do not shoulder the costs it could cause customers to go over their data caps and then pay various fees and fines.
Three's argument is that companies that transmit mobile ads instead of end-user viewers should pay for the cost. It plans to block all ads except some social media advertisements.
However, data transmissions involve both servers and clients. Internet Service Providers (ISP) calculate pages that are downloaded/viewed from sites then count it towards customers' data caps. Meanwhile, the site's host provider also tracks the data minus ads towards the bandwidth limits.
An advertiser's server provides the ads and also pays its own hosting provider for transmitting ads.
In a sense all data is transmitted twice, according to SlashGear. That is by the party that provides it and the party that downloads it.
Three is removing the only source of revenue for many websites. This will cause them to cover the costs of all visitors to their websites when Three customers browse the Internet.
The company is treating websites and ads as two different objects. However, when people click on a link they are implying they want the content and ads of the site.
This takes money away from the website's owners. They must pay for the bandwidth used when visitors browse their websites, and that becomes more arduous when a major or only source of revenue has been blocked.
Three UK is a telecom and ISP that was founded in 2003.
This video is about the ethics of ad blocking: