While most users have a love/hate relationship with HTC’s Blinkfeed, the company is planning to introduce a new feature which might push more users towards the latter. HTC is planning on introducing advertisements to Blinkfeed in order to monetize the social feed.
It will be in the form of sponsored ads and deals on HTC or its related products; similar to what you see on Facebook and Twitter these days. According to the leak posted by upleaks, users should be able to scroll past the ads as well just like on Facebook so it shouldn’t be too much of a bother to users. But if the frequency of the advertisements are too much then it will definitely annoy some users.
While normally this kind of advertisement is acceptable for a standalone app say for example if Blinkfeed was installed on another manufacturers phone, it is kind of tough for customers to digest considering the amount they’ve spent to get an HTC phone.
Users can still disable Blinkfeed of course but if they really do require the feature, they would be losing out by doing so. But on the flipside, this is currently still being planned and we don’t think that HTC has finalized whether or not they will be implementing this. But we feel that if they do and based on the reaction of users, they may have to reconsider their move.