Saturday, March 10, 2018

Google: Commence Ad Blocking


February 15, 2018 marked an important day in advertiser history — this was the day Google began blocking intrusive ads by default in Chrome (much to the chagrin of producers of said intrusive ads). Google announced plans for this change in June 2017, and confirmed the rollout date along with additional guidance in December. They based their interpretation of “intrusive” using the Coalition for Better Ads standards, with examples including video ads that play at full volume, popups with no exit buttons, or flashing display ads (additional examples below).




“We’ve already seen more and more people express their discontent with annoying ads by installing ad blockers, but blocking all ads can hurt sites or advertisers who aren’t doing anything disruptive,” says Rahul Roy-Chowdhury, vice president for Chrome. “By focusing on filtering out disruptive ad experiences, we can help keep the entire ecosystem of the web healthy, and give people a significantly better user experience than they have today,”

This switch comes as good news for advertisers who have been producing non-intrusive ads all along, and bad news for advertisers who were not. From the user perspective, the results will not be immediately game changing. And while it is unlikely that users will now uninstall any ad blockers they were using in the past, over time new users will likely depend more heavily on Google to filter the worst of the ads, leaving room for well-produced ads to take the stage.


Read more

No comments: