Earlier this year, Google revealed that its popular Chrome browser will block ads automatically in the future. That seemed to be a counterintuitive move from the tech company who wrote the book on making money from ads on the internet.
We already have tools that block web ads, but Google’s tool isn’t going to work similarly. Instead of cutting all advertisements, the built-in Chrome ad blocker will only act against sites that violate specific ad standards.
The Chrome ad blocker will start working on February 15th, when Google will turn it on automatically. As VentureBeat explains, the date doesn’t coincide with a new Chrome release. Chrome 64 will drop on January 23rd, while Chrome 65 should be released on March 6th.
The blocker will punish those websites that run ads that don’t adhere to the standards imposed by the Coalition for Better Ads that Google joined earlier this year.
Full page ad interstitials, ads that play sound automatically, and flashing ads are among the kind of ads that are banned in the future.
Any violations will be reported to site owners, who’ll be able to submit their sites for re-review once the issues have been fixed. If these problems aren’t fixed, the Chrome blocker will block all ads shown on the guilty website until the problems are fixed.
Google told VentureBeat that a single violation will not be enough for a publisher to be “failing” Google’s ad standards. The goal here is for publishers to display better ads, not for Google to remove ads altogether.
Site owners will have a tool at their disposal to see the problems and issue fixes — that’s the Ad Experience Report tool.
