Google to activate Chrome's native ad blocker on February 15

[Shawn Knight]

Google’s decision to join the Coalition for Better Ads earlier this year signaled that big changes were coming in the world of online advertising. On Tuesday, the search giant revealed exactly when those changes will go into effect.

Announced on Monday, the Coalition for Better Ads Experience Program is a voluntary initiative designed to improve the online ad experience for both consumers and publishers. The program will certify web publishers that adopt the principles of the Better Ad Standards, or those that agree not to run the most disruptive ads.

The native ad blocker that Google has built into its Chrome browser will get to work starting February 15, 2018, the search giant confirmed today.

Pop-up ads, auto-play video ads with sound, prestitial ads with countdowns and large sticky ads have all been identified as falling below the Better Ads Standard on desktops. For mobile environments, the Coalition has identified pop-up ads, prestitial ads, ads with density greater than 30 percent, flashing animated ads, auto-play video ads with sound, poststitial ads with countdowns, full-screen scrollover ads and large sticky ads as being non-acceptable.

As Venture Beat highlights, Google’s timing is interesting as it doesn’t coincide with the launch of a new version of Chrome (Chrome 64 is set to arrive on January 23 followed by Chrome 65 on March 6). This suggests Google will remotely activate the feature and may roll it out incrementally.

Google is taking an all-or-nothing approach with the ad blocking. If there’s a single ad on a page that breaks the rules, all ads on that page will be blocked, even if the others are in compliance.

The goal seems to be for Google to cut back on users’ use of third-party ad blockers that ban all ads outright. Google is in the business of serving ads, after all, so it only makes sense that they want to protect their lucrative revenue stream.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/72385-google-activate-chrome-native-ad-blocker-february-15.html

 

[TomSEA]

I'll give this a shot when it's activated. I get that websites rely on ads for revenue and don't have a problem with that. Other than for the most part those ads are insanely intrusive and annoying. Which is why I use an adblocker right now with just a handful of pages white listed.

Make the ads reasonable and I'll turn off the adblocker.

 

[oldikes]

For me, this still doesnt solve the largest problems with ads. One, most of them are so script heavy that CPU usage on less powerful devices shoots up, and increases battery drain, heat, etc. Even my iphone doesnt like the ads on Techspot mobile when im scrolling past them and I get stuttering.

The other thing is, and google/facebook are the worst about it, is the cookies and the tracking. Ive got 2-3 plugins in my browser just in an attempt to keep this at bay. I dont want targeted ads, and I'm even less likely to give the impression let alone a click to ads that are tracking my browsing habits.

Autoplay audio and pop ups should have been nipped in the bud a decade ago. Ill stick to keeping my current solution. Advertisers already have plenty of data to make decisions on without my browsing habits - maybe someday we'll get past this stage of collecting data just for the sake of collecting data that every big company seems to be stuck in.

 

[Evernessince]

I'll give this a shot when it's activated. I get that websites rely on ads for revenue and don't have a problem with that. Other than for the most part those ads are insanely intrusive and annoying. Which is why I use an adblocker right now with just a handful of pages white listed.

Make the ads reasonable and I'll turn off the adblocker.

The premise of their adblocker sounds good to me. So long as you follow the rules for making your ads non-intrusive, you don't get blocked. Break the rules, and all your ads are blocked.

I'm expect that this will go a long ways to help regular people who aren't computer savvy. It's really surprising to see how many people still don't install ad blockers. At this point it's basically a security risk.

 

[ghostf1re]

I'll stick with my ad blockers. Google can hold onto theirs. I hate ads. You can expect their ad blocker won't be blocking YouTube ads, so using it probably won't make sense for someone who blocks those ads. I for one, can't stand waiting on a YouTube ad, so they are always going to stay blocked.

 

[Cycloid Torus]

I don't hate ads, I hate malware. Give me a reason to think that this eliminates malware in the ad stream and I will try it - else NOT.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

Ah yes, google, the same company that has repeatedly allowed malware to get onto the play store, is promising to bring 'ad-blocking'.

their ad blocking will have all the things I hate: tracking cookies, no guarantee of security, the only benefit will be the lack of autoplaying ads, until google changes their mind again like an ADHD kid on a sugar rush and allows them again.

I'll stick to ublock, thank you very much.

 

[wiyosaya]

Ah yes, google, the same company that has repeatedly allowed malware to get onto the play store, is promising to bring 'ad-blocking'.

their ad blocking will have all the things I hate: tracking cookies, no guarantee of security, the only benefit will be the lack of autoplaying ads, until google changes their mind again like an ADHD kid on a sugar rush and allows them again.

I'll stick to ublock, thank you very much.

Agreed!

Since gagme is taking so long to activate this, I cannot help thinking that there is some not-so-benign motivation behind it. After all, it goes against their core business. It may yet be another socially engineered feature in chrome to designed to keep their market share - and to keep gagme spying on everything chrome users do.

 

[PeterTS]

It madness google are so easily rolling this out and dictating across the globe what is acceptable user experience. The Coalition for Better Ads is a industry group (only recently formed) who have been tricked into thinking they were building an orderly industry body and to find Google has taken advantage of them by using this as their excuse to regulate the industry to their benefit. You can see other members of that group like the IAB who have written an open letter late 2017 confirming they don't agree with google plans http://adage.com/article/digital/trade-bodies-google-judge-jury-executioner/310865/
(Its noteworthy, to my knowledge IAB has never written such an open letter before).

For me, I have a pop-up which is show after strict page and time based triggers on my site. Its not full screen format & if closed by a user they don't show again for another 180 days. The overlay/pop-up offers users the option to sign -up to my newsletter and benefit from a small monthly prize. This unit gets slightly above 1% impression to sign-up rate and is the backbone to my member list (85% my sign-ups). My previous touch points for the same newsletter involved X3 sizeable banners across most pages on my site for which I got minimal sign-ups and site was cluttered with banners. Why should google dictate to me how I design my site ? how is it reasonable that google has become the police of user experience?

As it seem my overlay/pop-up is going to be forcefully removed by Chrome - I'm trying to investigate this issue and have spent time on https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ad-experience-unverified?hl=en. This is google's site for checking the Ad Experience Report. Some issues I've found so far:
1) google webtools offer "other" units (note: which google naturally support can serve via their ad product) which they explain gives the same real estate. In fact, these units are X3 times bigger then my smaller pop-up and thus I'd prefer not to use them as I don't like them and I don't think my users will either.
2) The video explains that all pop-ups are going to be blocked? I'm rather sure that's totally misleading as Coalition for Better Ads says its only pop-ups which consume more then 30% of the page. Google video shows a very small pop-up & again explains it "all" pop-ups. Is google (a) being stricter then the Coalition for Better Ads (b) the content on this site is misleading.
3) I've member of google.com/webmasters/tools for years and the video indicates I can test and get reviewed. That is incorrect, I can't even "request a review" and the video is very unclear. So again, mid Feb google will be rolling out and blocking "all pop-ups" and there is no way I can actually test? I understand google has thousands of developers so does not have resource issues like everyone else, but they've clearly set short timeline of mid feb and from what I can tell are making it very tough to actually review this issue.
4) hypocrites. I'm amused by this article about admob dealing with incorrect publisher fears about on-the-page ads.https://www.seroundtable.com/admob-interstitials-penalty-23491.html. Google are NOT blocking pop-ups within mobile apps but are blocking pop-ups in mobile website? So admob (as I'm sure everyone knows is google in-app advertising platform) has no issues with pop-ups and I can serve these all day to mobile users within my app.

In a nutshell, annoying ads are an issue and its actually a very complex issue. For me and my site I'm keen not to annoy my users and I'm keen to build up newsletter sign-ups. Right now due to my overlay display rules, smart and small units I serve my pop-up to only 3-4% of my daily impressions verse previously 3 banners to all impressions and get far more sign-ups. The decisions behind my site design should not be controlled by the worlds largest advertising company and it sad that it is. I agree with the post before mine, this is not google being the good guy, they are carefully making sure their market share keeps growing and their products stay at the very top.