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‘Rainbow’ will stop selling ad blocking services, to make money selling ads instead.
Israeli company Shine has abandoned its market leading ad blocking roots which offer ad blocking solutions at a network level to mobile carriers, and has changed its name to Rainbow.
Rainbow says it has “quietly” been working with the mobile advertising industry over the past few months to create a consumer mobile ad blocker that only blocks ads that don’t meet industry standards.
Will Rainbow find it difficult to convince advertisers that they now want to be buddies?
The previous version of Shine was designed to block all ads. For advertisers and publishers looking to make sure that their ads are whitelisted and not blocked, Rainbow will work in a similar way to the AdBlock Plus “Acceptable Ads” whitelisting process we reported on last year.
Ad blockers, which allow web users to turn off unwanted marketing campaigns are becoming ever more popular for internet users as a way to speed up browsers, stop annoying pop-ups, and for controlling what they do and don’t see when online.
Advertisers and content owners however, have long argued that ad blocking software puts the idea of the world-wide web being free for most content, in jeopardy by stopping them from making money from ad-funded internet services.
“We have been really trying to identify a path forward and the commercialization opportunities for the base technology,” said Rainbow executive James Collier.
Shine (Rainbow) is however so much more than just software. It also installs network-level hardware with mobile carriers and Internet Service Providers. Collier said Rainbow’s new business model will make money only “when it adds value to the ad, so we’re not charging for access to the consumer.” That means brands or agencies can, for an ad campaign targeting any of Rainbow’s opted-in consumer base, pay a fee that allows them to “pin that audience against the network-level mobile data or the telco CRM data” on subscribers.
Under the new system, ad agencies will send their adverts to the Rainbow platform to be verified. The service will no doubt be popular as it is free to both publishers and consumers and it will also not charge advertisers to validate its ads.
Instead Rainbow expects to make money from selling insights and analytics products based on the data from its software service that can then be sold on to advertisers. “If someone is being served 15 to 20 car ads a day because they are in the market for a car, we can say ‘don’t serve any more’,” Collier concluded.
Consumers who have opted into the service will only be shown Rainbow-verified ads while the rest will be filtered out.
One of the reasons Shine changed its name to Rainbow is because it has spent the last two years or so, effectively screaming and deriding the way the online ad industry currently operates, demanding that it cleans up its act. Rainbow may find it difficult to convince some of the burned advertisers that now they want to be buddies.
Time will tell…