(The "Pivot!" scene from "Friends."YouTube/winoni71)
Shine, the Israel-based company that has been antagonizing the advertising industry with technology it claims to be the "nuclear weapon" option to block mobile ads at a network level, is making a surprising pivot.
It's chartering out a move into ad tech.
On Thursday, Shine announced it plans to launch an "ad verification platform," which will roll out from October.
It puts Shine in direct competition with the likes of DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science, Moat, Forensiq, and Adometry.
Broadly speaking, ad verification services offer technology to ensure that online ads appear on the sites the advertiser intended them to appear on in front of the audience they wanted to serve the ads in front of.
Online ad fraud is a huge issue that ad verification helps tackle. Every year, billions of dollars of ad spend is wasted as ads are served to bots rather than humans, with fraudsters using complex webs of networked computers to siphon off legitimate marketing budgets for themselves. Ad fraud is expected to become so rampant it will cost advertisers more than $50 billion in lost spend by 2025, according to the World Federation of Advertisers, which said last month the practice is "second only to the drugs trade" as a source of income for organized crime.
So why does Shine, a company that has previously likened online advertising to "consumer abuse", give a hoot about lost ad dollars?
In a conversation with Business Insider in London, Shine's chief marketing officer Roi Carthy and its newly-appointed chief revenue officer James Collier — who was last at Experian-owned device recognition company AdTruth — explained it is in everyone's benefit to remove fraud from the system.
For example, some ad fraud techniques involve hijacking users' mobile devices to run ads in the background, serving hundreds of ads at a rate as high as 20 per minute. That would have an obvious implication on users' data allowances and mobile carriers are having to do the heavy lifting of serving those malicious ads on their networks.
Shine's ad verification service will monitor ads that are served over mobile data services, in app or over the mobile web. It will charge on a cost-per-mille (CPM/cost-per-thousand) basis — a premium advertisers would pay on top of their ad buys to ensure their ads are being served to a quality, human audience.
It remains to be seen whether there will be demand for such a service as Shine will need to get permission from carriers to run its technology in their data centers. So far, the company has only signed up two operators — Digicel in the Caribbean and Three in the UK and Italy — to its ad blocking service. Digicel has about 14 million subscribers, while Three has about 9 million customers in the UK and around the same in Italy.