Google Wages War on Annoying Adverts and Ad Blockers

News we’ve all been waiting for! Google has announced its plans to filter out “annoying ads” via it’s Chrome browser, and at the same time enable publishers to charge customers who view their site content using an ad blocker. Can this be the ‘win win’ solution that WE are looking for?

In an effort to make the web a better place, Google have joined the Coalition for Better Ads, an industry group dedicated to improving online ads. The group’s recently announced Better Ads Standards provide clear, public, data-driven guidance for how the industry can improve ads for consumers.

Annoying ads in this case are those really intrusive ones which blare music unexpectedly, or force you to wait 10 seconds before you can see the content on the page. By giving publishers advance notice, Google hopes to get them to adapt less intrusive advertising formats. The company is also offering publishers affected by ad blockers another way to monetise their content.

In a blog post, Sridhar Ramaswamy, Google ads and commerce SVP wrote: “These frustrating experiences can lead some people to block all ads—taking a big toll on the content creators, journalists, web developers and videographers who depend on ads to fund their content creation. We believe online ads should be better.”

Google plans to add its ad blocker to both the desktop and mobile versions of Chrome next year. However, unlike other ad blockers, Google’s goal isn’t to filter out all advertising. The software will instead remove advertising formats that have been deemed unacceptable by the Coalition for Better Ads. Some of these ad formats include auto-playing video ads with sound, pop-up ads and ads that take over more than 30 percent of a mobile screen.

The new Ad Experience Report helps publishers understand how the Better Ads Standards apply to their own websites. It provides screenshots and videos of annoying ad experiences we’ve identified to make it easy to find and fix the issues. For a full list of ads to use instead, publishers can visit our new best practices guide.

Google will let publishers ask people who use ad-blockers to either enable advertising or make a payment to view content without ads via Google Contributor. The group “Funding Choices” will roll out first in North America, UK, Germany, Australia and New Zealand, Google said in a blog.

Recent figures from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) suggested that 22% of UK adults use an ad-blocking service online.

In 2016 the service Ad Blocker Plus claimed to have more than 100 million active users worldwide.

Read the Google announcement here