Google's Big Ad-Blocking Update Comes to Chrome
Google is enabling a built-in ad blocker for Chrome. This ad blocker filters out ads that do not meet some quality standards.
"While most advertising on the web is respectful of user experience, over the years we've increasingly heard from our users that some advertising can be particularly intrusive," Chris Bentzel, Google's Engineering Manager, wrote on the company's blog.
It is not a surprise that the world's most popular search engine will be releasing such an update. According to The Wall Street Journal, Google has been planning to introduce this ad-blocking feature since early last year.
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The ad blocker is reportedly designed to filter out annoying ads that do not conform to the standards of the Coalition for Better Ads, an industry group dedicated to improving online advertisements.
With these standards, Google is evaluating ads and then rating them with either a passing mark, a warning, or a failing mark. According to the Verge, these evaluations can be accessed by the site owners using the Ad Experience Report application programming interface (API). Once a site gets several violations, Chrome may start blocking the ads on the site after 30 days.
The Coalition for Better Ads listed 12 types of ads that usually annoy users. The standards for these ads are based on a survey done by the group wherein over 40,000 internet users were asked to evaluate the intrusiveness of certain ads.
The survey showed that pop-up ads, prestitial ads with countdowns, auto-play video ads with sound, and large sticky ads were the most problematic ads for desktop users. Mobile users also find these types of ads intrusive but are also annoyed with flashing animated ads, large sticky ads, postitial ads with countdowns, ads that take up more than 30 percent of the content of a page, and full-screen scroll over ads.
Users have the choice to disable the built-in feature by selecting the "allow ads on this site" option.
