HTC’s customised news and information tool, Blinkfeed is getting an update, which will allow them to deliver promotions to be displayed in the app from a number of partners.
The partners aren’t your wild-west free-for-all advertisers, rather the promotions will be from prominent providers such as Yahoo, Twitter, and Appia, and HTC themselves will be using the promotions to send information about new accessories or devices from themselves.
The promotions will be trialled in selected markets – the U.S., U.K., Germany, Taiwan, and China – though it’s expected to arrive in other countries if trials in these countries go well. But, this is just a pilot at this stage, so it could be called off at any time if testing doesn’t go well.
HTC is aiming to make the introduction of promotions in Blinkfeed as easy as possible, intending to allow users to turn them off,, but they hope you won’t. With monetisation the obvious key behind the move, the onus is on HTC to make this work, we’ll see how it goes when they flick the switch.
Do you use Blinkfeed? Would you be inclined to see how the promotions fit in to your Blinkfeed, or turn it off outright?
Hmm…. Wrong move by htc at this time.
I’ll definitely be opting out as I didn’t buy a HTC phone to receive advertising. I actually really like Blinkfeed. I might consider another brand next time I purchase.