The war on mobile ads is heating up in the European Union as several mobile carriers are preparing to block these ads on their network. The latest carrier to be considering such a move is O2 UK.
According to Robert Franks, managing director of digital commerce at O2, the company is looking into the practice of blocking ads on mobile devices. He says the network is already having conversations on how to best go about blocking advertisements, and that talks are in the advanced stages.
"When I say we are looking at these technologies, we are not just paying lip service to them," Franks explains. "[W]e are absolutely having conversations which are well-advanced in terms of what that technology would do in our network...and how we would position this with customers."
This move by O2 came after EE announced its plans to do a similar thing in the near future.
Back in May of this year, there was a report that several mobile carriers were considering the need to block ads on their networks. Apparently, one European mobile operator had already been on the verge of installing the software needed to make mobile ads a thing of the past.
This could turn out to be a huge problem for ad companies such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others. Google would feel the brunt of the blow a lot more since the majority of the company's revenue comes from selling ads.
Also, millions of websites on the web that rely solely on an ad-based revenue would also come under attack.
Ad-blocking continues to surge in popularity in just a short number of years. At the moment, there are quite a few ad-blocking tools for the desktop, and these tools are expected to take mobile devices by storm. However, the number of Internet users who use these tools are small, so for most European mobile operators to block ads, it would be a huge deal.
According to Edward Snowden, ad-blocking makes for a cleaner and more secure browsing experience.
As it stands, we could be looking at a war of ideologies and also a complete power struggle in the future, one that could work out well for mobile operators should they negotiate to get a piece of the pie from Google and others.
