In an interview on Tuesday, AT&T CEO John Stankey says the company is thinking about offering phone plans subsidized by ads as soon as next year (via Reuters).
Subsidized Phone Plans
How much would the price be lowered? Probably not by much:
I believe there’s a segment of our customer base where given a choice, they would take some load of advertising for a $5 or $10 reduction in their mobile bill.
Next year AT&T plans to introduced an ad-supported version of streaming service HBO Max, and believes it could be a “foundational element” to these subsidized phone plans. Additionally, AT&T is also creating “unified customer identifiers” which would allow advertisers to track users across devices to serve targeted ads.
The announcement comes in light of Apple’s move to stop tracking in iOS 14, a move that will incentivize advertisers to explore other ways of monetizing users.
Well as long as Google doesn’t have a footer ad blocking content.