So much for sticking « nuclear weapons » in carriers’ dumb pipes. Shine, last year’s enfant terrible of mobile ad blocking is pivoting (again!) — in both tone..
So much for sticking “nuclear weapons” in carriers’ dumb pipes. Shine, last year’s enfant terrible of mobile ad blocking is pivoting ( again! ) — in both tone of voice and business model. It’s also rebranding to, er, Rainbow.
So, to keep tabs, since 2011 this Disrupt startup battlefield alum has moved from trying to sell mobile antivirus ( Shine Security ), to threatening network-level mobile ad blocking ( Shine Technologies ), to — its latest pivot — touting a permission-based marketing platform ( Rainbow ), which is slated to launch in “late summer”, according to CRO James Collier, who joined the company last June as a hire from the — duh-duh- duh ! — ad industry. You can see exactly where this story is going.
Unsurprisingly then, given its new, emollient incarnation, Rainbow is no longer threatening to cut off the ad industry’s access to mobile users’ eyeballs as payment for its data-sapping crimes. Indeed, Rainbow is abandoning the push for/threat of network-level mobile ad blocking. Which, in any case, looked mostly like a loud-mouthed PR strategy to grab as many ad industry exec eyeballs as possible in the hopes of shaking a business model out of the bushes.
Shine had also only chalked up one full deployment of its network-level ad blocking tech: Caribbean mobile operator Digicel; had zero revenue as it was not charging carriers for deployments; and was arguably on shaky regulatory ground in Europe, given net neutrality laws.
Well, after spending the last six months apparently cosying up to ad agencies to spec out its third business plan, here are those next steps — funded by an undisclosed amount of additional investment from its existing investors, led by Horizon Ventures. (Investors who will clearly be hoping for third time luck at the end of this Rainbow.)
The new idea is to act as an ad verification layer, hosted at the network level (by carrier partners, who get cut in via a revenue share) to help enforce industry standards for so called ‘better ads’. So Rainbow is not going to be coming up with any ‘better ad’ criteria itself; rather it’s leaving that to its new best friends in the ad industry — intending to act, purely, as the verifier of existing/established ad standards programs (such as the IAB’s LEAN initiative).
It will not be charging ad agencies to submit their creative for verification. So this is not a paid-whitelist “acceptable ads” model, as per ad blockers such as AdBlock Plus (though ABP amassed vast numbers of users in the desktop era to make that approach fly vs Rainbow having to start from scratch and convince mobile users it’s worth their while to opt in). The verification process will be open to anyone — although only the ads that pass muster will be viewable to Rainbow opt-ins.
Nor, for the record, is Rainbow intending to focus on ad security considerations. So it will not be guaranteeing that verified ads are malware free, for example.
