United Kingdom mobile operator Three has recently announced their plans of blocking mobile advertisement with their own ad-blocking technology which will be tested by half a million customers.
Three will be contacting 500,000 of their customers who are willing to try out their ad-blocking technology. The said mobile advertisement blocking tech will be tested for a whole 24 hours.
The mobile operator believes that the mobile advertising model is "broken." Ad-blockers often used because people want to avoid intrusive ads that can be annoying too as they suddenly pop up on screen.
Mobile advertisements are twice as annoying as they can be accidentally tapped because of the limited screen space on a smartphone or a tablet. Three wants to help users save their data and to also avoid tracking without consent, Pulse Headlines has learned.
Free content in the Internet is not entirely free. Users are still charged in the form of advertisements that help pay for the website and its content creators as well.
Subscription-based models are sometimes not as successful as the free ones. People do not like paying for content they want to see on their computers and that is evident with the rampant piracy through torrent sites and other illegal free streaming sites which are also bombarded with ads.
Three believes that customers should not pay for the data that is consumed when an advertisement is downloaded and viewed on a mobile phone, SlashGear reported. Video ads are the most hated because they can use up too much data.
Without advertisements, however, websites could lose money. They pay for the bandwidth that is used whenever someone enters their webpage, watches a video or downloads a clip or an image.
Three is just one of the many Internet Service Providers (ISP) across the globe. They would not really make much of a difference alone.
However, other mobile operators such as Verizon and Comcast could pick up the trend and introduce their own ad-blocking technology as well. It could spell doom for free content providers on the web.
Three's mobile ad-blocking tech will be open to 500,000 of its customers and will be tested for 24 hours. It could still affect a small percentage of websites relying on ads to stay afloat.