This August, Google’s Chrome web browser will start blocking long, “non-skippable” preroll ads, ads that block a big chunk of your video, and ads that interrupt your videos in the middle, if the video you’re watching is under eight minutes long.
That’s actually the official guidance from the Coalition for Better Ads, of which Google is a board member, and will probably impact other companies as well. Microsoft and Facebook are also on the Better Ads board.
The Coalition for Better Ads surveyed 45,000 consumers worldwide, and found that most users are especially irritated by ads that make you wait five seconds to skip ahead, mid-roll ads that appear in the middle of a video, as well as images or text that appear on top of a video and are in the middle third of the player or block more than 20 percent of the video.
Beginning August 5th, Chrome will stop showing all ads on sites that repeatedly show these especially annoying formats. YouTube will have to comply, too, and Chrome says it will review its product plans across its ad platforms.
Google has been attempting to block annoying video ads for years. The goal is to filter out the most noxious offenders to that users don’t resort to ad blockers, which hurt overall revenue. Since 2018, Google says it has seen ad blocking rates in North America and Europe drop significantly in Chrome, and it hopes the new ad standards will reduce ad blocking even more.
