Plenty of companies and content creators work hard to balance the number of ads on their sites and videos so as not to force their fans or visitors to use an ad blocker, but others don’t seem to care. Thankfully, Google introduced a built-in ad blocker for its Chrome browser back in 2018 which forces sites to either comply with industry standards or have their ads blocked. On Wednesday, Google announced it is extending the ad blocker to videos.
“Today, the group responsible for developing the Better Ads Standards, the Coalition for Better Ads, announced a new set of standards for ads that show during video content, based on research from 45,000 consumers worldwide,” said Jason James of Google in a post on the Chromium Blog earlier today.
These are the three ad experiences that users find to be disruptive on videos that are less than 8 minutes long:
- Long, non-skippable pre-roll ads or groups of ads longer than 31 seconds that appear before a video and that cannot be skipped within the first 5 seconds.
- Mid-roll ads of any duration that appear in the middle of a video, interrupting the user’s experience.
- Image or text ads that appear on top of a playing video and are in the middle 1/3 of the video player window or cover more than 20 percent of the video content.
The Coalition says that website owners using any of these three kinds of ads need to stop showing them within the next four months or risk losing advertising altogether. Chrome will begin enforcing these rules on August 5th, 2020, at which point it will “stop showing all ads on sites in any country that repeatedly show these disruptive ads.” The Coalition also specifically calls out YouTube.com, which happens to be owned by Google.
