Well, we knew it was coming and, on a day between June 13th and 20th, it’ll be happening. UK network Three will be blocking advertising. Three state that this is because they’re effectively having to pay for the ads to be displayed on your mobile device, and that some ads are “intrusive”, “excessive” or “unwanted”.
This entire situation, let’s face it, has come about because a small subsection of websites and advertisers have pushed things too far. Website owners and some local newspapers saw that more revenue could be made by having full-page interstitial ads, pop-unders, floaters, pre-roll and sound / video multi-media ads. They pushed every button. They turned everything up to “11” and bombarded the browsing experience with a visible vomit of commercials that had to be minimised or closed. For the traditional press, who’ve seen print revenue dry up, they started to get even more desperate, with bigger and more annoying ads pushing content all over the place.
A solution to this still hasn’t really become clear. Subscription systems sometimes work for certain newspapers but for others (like The Sun), they’ve chosen to go back to the ad-fest.
Whilst it doesn’t suit everyone (what does?), we’ve chosen to only use “well behaved” adverts and, despite numerous (let me tell you – NUMEROUS) advances by ad-networks to push “ads that generate greater page views and revenues” (i.e. massively intrusive and annoying), we’ve held back. We’ve added a friendly reminder of that if you do choose to check this site regularly with an ad-blocker.
So Three will be blocking “95%” of pop-ups and adverts (presumably their own adverts too?) However, they won’t be blocking “pre-roll video adverts and in-feed promotions on social networks on Twitter and Facebook”.
Personally speaking, that sounds like Three will keep the big social media sites happy but will knock over a lot of the smaller publishers.