Published in Mobiles

ASUS gets built in ad-blocker

by on28 December 2015


This will annoy the content industry

ASUS is installing ad-blocking software in all its phones or tablet and will enable it by default.

AdBlock Plus’s cofounder and CEO, Till Faida revealed that his company was working with ASUS to bring ad blocking to the hardware manufacturer's stock browser. More than this, ad blocking will be switched on by default.

This is a move which will sail up the nasal passages of Big Content everywhere.  It will be installed in the ASUS browser which is generally used by those to download other browsers.  It is apparently used by more than 15 million people.  But the cruicial thing is that the move might be copied by other browser makers.

"We're extremely happy to team up with Asus, the first major hardware manufacturer to integrate ad blocking into their mobile devices. This is another call for innovation in the ad industry -- a call getting louder by the day," Faida said.

This year saw lots of debates as Big Content fought against ad-blocking technology as a way of protecting the revenue from news sites. As a news site dependant on advertising we have some sympathy however most of the big content sites effectively stuffed up their own business model by listening to their advertising departments and creating adverts which were so intrusive that you practically had to install ad-blockers if you wanted to read the content.

Particularly annoying is the browser hijake which turns your screen black other than the advert, or something that requires you to fill in a questionarre and give the company all your private data before you can read a news story.  These make great sense to advertising deparments who, face it, only see their bonus for selling an expensive advert and don't realise that people are not actually visiting the site to look at ads.

 

Last modified on 28 December 2015
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