The ad blocking fire has been stoked a few degrees higher with Apple’s decision to approve a new app, the oddly-named Been Choice, which blocks in-app ads, as opposed to conventional mobile ads.
So with Been Choice (and all your other heavy artillery) you can get rid of mobile ads for ever.
Been Choice makes its money by inviting ad blockers (people that is) to sign up for ad messages and share their other data for $20 a month. As far as we know it’s US only.
So instead of calling it an ad blocker we might call it an ad revenue re-router: some advertisers will decide to shift their money to Been Choice’s audience, assuming there are enough of them.
It’s quite likely that publishers and others are getting far too excited (and alarmed) about all this. You’ve been able to block ads on TV in various ways for years now but most of the evidence shows that most people don’t. The mobile generation is more tech savvy though so we’ll see.
Quite what Apple gets out of this is something of a mystery. Maybe its view is that so long as an app is legal, decent etc they have a duty to approve it. Or maybe they have a cunning plan to siphon off all that frustrated ad money themselves. Or maybe both.
But nobody looks at the ads on their mobiles anyway because some of them slow the whole process down so much, especially on the UK’s lumbering broadband system. (Apart from MAA readers, of course).
