Google Chrome will soon begin blocking all ads (including those served by Google) on websites that repeatedly include certain "non-compliant" (annoying) ads:
In June, Google revealed that Chrome will stop showing all ads (including those owned or served by Google) on websites that display non-compliant ads "starting in early 2018." Now the company has committed to a date: Chrome's built-in ad-blocker will start working on February 15, 2018.
[...] Google this year joined the Coalition for Better Ads, a group that offers specific standards for how the industry should improve ads for consumers — full-page ad interstitials, ads that unexpectedly play sound, and flashing ads are all banned. Yesterday, the coalition announced the Better Ads Experience Program, which provides guidelines for companies using the Better Ads Standards to improve users' experience with online ads.
[...] The hope is that Chrome's built-in ad blocker will stymie the usage of other third-party ad blockers that block all ads outright. Google has noted in the past that ad blockers that do not discriminate hurt publishers that create free content (like VentureBeat) and threaten "the sustainability of the web ecosystem." Despite the fact that Google makes the vast majority of its revenue from ads, the company sees its selective ad blocker as the natural evolution of pop-up blockers.
Also at Engadget, Variety, and 9to5Google.
Previously: Google Preparing to Filter "Unacceptable Ads" in 2018
Related Stories
Google plans to block "unacceptable" ads in Google Chrome starting in 2018, and is preparing publishers for this reality:
News that Google intends to install an ad-blocker in its Chrome browser shocked the tech and publishing world in April. Now, details of how the program will work are starting to become clear.
The Google ad-blocker will block all advertising on sites that have a certain number of "unacceptable ads," according to The Wall Street Journal. That includes ads that have pop-ups, auto-playing video, and "prestitial" count-down ads that delay the display of content.
[...] The company hasn't made its plans public, but Google has discussed its plans with publishers, who will get at least six months to prepare for the change coming sometime in 2018. Publishers will get a tool called "Ad Experience Reports," which "will alert them to offending ads on their sites and explain how to fix the issues," the Journal reports.
Google is also offering a tool called "Funding Choices," which would present users who have non-Chrome ad blockers with a message asking them to disable their ad-blockers or pay to remove advertising.
When you open a YouTube video, it typically auto-plays an advertisement.
Will this become Google's antitrust moment?
Critics wary as Google's Chrome begins an ad crackdown
On Thursday, Google will begin using its Chrome browser to eradicate ads it deems annoying or otherwise detrimental to users. It just so happens that many of Google's own most lucrative ads will sail through its new filters. The move, which Google first floated back in June, is ostensibly aimed at making online advertising more tolerable by flagging sites that run annoying ads such as ones that auto-play video with sound. And it's using a big hammer: Chrome will start blocking all ads — including Google's own — on offending sites if they don't reform themselves.
There's some irony here, given that Google's aim is partly to convince people to turn off their own ad-blocking software. These popular browser add-ons deprive publishers (and Google) of revenue by preventing ads from displaying.
Google vice president Rahul Roy-Chowdhury wrote in a blog post that the company aims to keep the web healthy by "filtering out disruptive ad experiences."
But the company's motives and methods are both under attack. Along with Facebook, Google dominates the online-advertising market; together they accounted for over 63 percent of the $83 billion spent on U.S. digital ads last year, according to eMarketer. Google is also virtually synonymous with online search, and Chrome is the most popular browser on the web, with a roughly 60 percent market share. So to critics, Google's move looks less like a neighborhood cleanup than an assertion of dominance.
Is this Google's antitrust moment? (Is this a recycled comment?)
- Under the hood: How Chrome's ad filtering works
- The Initial Better Ads Standards
- Exclusive: Industry Experts On The Impact Of Google Chrome's Ad Blocker
Previously: Google Preparing to Filter "Unacceptable Ads" in 2018
Google Chrome to Begin Blocking "Non-Compliant Ads" on Feb. 15
Chrome 71 will block any and all ads on sites with "abusive experiences"
Google is promising to punish sites that offer what the company calls "abusive experiences." Chrome 71, due for release in December, will blacklist sites that are repeat offenders and suppress all advertising on those sites.
The behaviors deemed abusive cover a range of user-hostile things, such as ads that masquerade as system error messages, ads with fake close boxes that actually activate an ad when clicked, phishing, and malware. In general, if an ad is particularly misleading, destructive, or intrusive, it runs the risk of being deemed abusive.
Chrome already takes some actions against certain undesirable website behaviors; it tries to block popups, it limits autoplay of video, and it blocks certain kinds of redirection. These measures have been insufficient to prevent misleading or dangerous ads, hence Google taking further steps to banish them from the Web.
Also at The Verge, 9to5Google, Engadget, and Search Engine Journal.
Previously: Google Preparing to Filter "Unacceptable Ads" in 2018
Google Chrome to Begin Blocking "Non-Compliant Ads" on Feb. 15
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 20 2017, @12:33AM (13 children)
Some ads are more equal than others :)
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bob_super on Wednesday December 20 2017, @01:09AM (1 child)
People do need to get paid.
That said, Web advertisers (and websites) need to lose the impression that consumers can be bombarded with ads without reacting. Cable TV subs are dropping, adblockers are becoming common, BECAUSE some assholes don't want to understand that the only time when people tune in for the ads is the SuperBowl.
We want content. Mostly content. If the ads distract us from enjoying the content, we do something about them. Adding more ads to compensate for lower revenue per ad is the exact wrong reaction. Even if it was bright red page-wide between two paragraphs, I'd tolerate a static ad or two to pay for my content. Make it blink, make noise, bounce around, and mine some coins, and you can be assured I'll get out of my way to prevent it ever happening again.
Quite simple really. Less is more. Saturation doesn't associate with positive feedback (see: fucking Christmas music everywhere I go, telling me about letting it snow while we set fire records).
(Score: 4, Interesting) by moondrake on Wednesday December 20 2017, @12:42PM
People should be paid for being productive. Ads have little to do with that. In fact, they may cause productive work without ads go to waste.
Online advertisements, as currently implemented, are a fake, non-sustainable economy that is detrimental to economical development as a whole.
The best ad, for me personally, is that a product I need is findable in a search engine.
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Wednesday December 20 2017, @01:32AM
Because... right to free speech as long as it is paid for? (grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Insightful) by requerdanos on Wednesday December 20 2017, @01:39AM (5 children)
Well, their recommendations [betterads.org] tend towards the reasonable. For Desktop platforms, for example, no pop-ups, no auto-playing video with sound, no prestitial ads with countdown (like Forbes), and no large sticky ads.
Why not? because these ads "rank lowest across a range of user experience factors, and... are most highly correlated with an increased propensity for consumers to adopt ad blockers."
In other words, they are annoying and make reasonable people so annoyed that they actually want to block ads.
If you advertise, it is good to eliminate these practices because they make more people block ads, thus making your ads invisible and therefore ineffective.
If you look at ads sometimes, it is good to eliminate those practices because they are an obnoxious plague on the senses and your universe will be significantly better without them.
So, it looks like better ads standards are a good start.
They don't take into account things like ad networks serving malware (which could happen even with otherwise inoffensive-looking ads), and they split hairs to a confusing degree (annoying blinking ads on mobile are forbidden, but on desktop are okay--not sure I agree there), but they are better than the advertising industry's previous positions (such as research and development into how ads can be made more sleazy and annoying to increase click conversions, for example).
Google being a heavy hitter in the advertising world and endorsing the "don't be annoying" advertising standards so closely seems to me to be possibly a good thing.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by mhajicek on Wednesday December 20 2017, @05:38AM (2 children)
I would think all auto playing video should be nixed. That's my bandwidth you're commandeering.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Wednesday December 20 2017, @05:20PM (1 child)
You hit on a good point there that exposes something about the standards... Auto-playing video is bad, bad, bad. But - not specifically annoying enough to be "the absolute worst" experience that would send normal people screaming for something to block the annoyingness.
It takes someone with a level of knowledge and sophistication (the bar is pretty low for that) to connect that little silent film with "Muh [Mega|Giga]bytes".
It seems the standards are written to allow "get away with everything you can, but don't outright piss them off".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 20 2017, @06:11PM
Is that not how the US government works?
None of these tactics are new. The difference is that the behaviors are old--the millenials these are mostly targeted at don't have that experience to know this yet.
Eventually they will wisen up, but then next generation will fall victim to the next test of how much the "entity$" can get away before "customer$/resource$" puts a stop to it. No amount of education teaches a person that wet paint is wet, don't touch it. They do it anyway, and they'll punch the monkey in VR when it comes down to it.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 20 2017, @02:41PM (1 child)
Funny how easy it is to misread "cl" as "d" in this context ;-)
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday December 20 2017, @04:14PM
Yep. I read it that way and had to do a double take.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 1) by Gault.Drakkor on Wednesday December 20 2017, @01:52AM (1 child)
Some people are willing to pay for advertising. People are willing to be paid to display advertising. Some advertising has been proven to have positive return on investment.
Even if all advertising(drugs/guns/___) is banned/illegal, we will still observe advertising(drugs/guns___). Because there is demand for that sort of thing. Advertising is an x billion dollar industry. Do you want those x dollars going into vanilla/tolerable ads? Or do you want it funding the next generation of the advertising arms race?
If advertisers are not given a legit outlet, we are likely to face/experience the most nasty advertisements that you can't possibly want to image forcing there way in to your thoughts somehow.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday December 21 2017, @06:16AM
One of the big advertisers (Proctor & Gamble? someone on that scale, anyway) lately experimented with halting internet ads, and discovered.... no difference in sales.
I wonder how long before everyone realises the only ones benefiting from these ads are the marketing agencies??
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday December 20 2017, @05:55AM
Reminds me of the Brave [wikipedia.org] browser:
Brave Browser Hit with "Cease and Desist" from Newspaper Publishers [soylentnews.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 20 2017, @07:45AM
Because I actually like watching some ads?
May Thai ads are entertaining even though I don't understand Thai:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRc-Sr7Qh1c [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbc4grjOA-o [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGmJVpYtIUA [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9TWrti5gAY [youtube.com]
There are other entertaining Non-Thai ads too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=el1I79Pwo3k [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebPd26u9n-A [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39MILG4txBk&list=PL4F3C1016A2216AB3 [youtube.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by Snotnose on Wednesday December 20 2017, @12:40AM
So, ublock origin survives another stay of execution.
Hey Google, guess what? I don't want any ads that aren't static. I don't want autoplay video. It pisses me off when I block an autoplay video but the video keeps loading, taking up my bandwidth. I have pirated CDs and movies I have to fit under my cap, I really don't want your autoplay crap dicking with my monthly download cap.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by snufu on Wednesday December 20 2017, @01:56AM (1 child)
I will do what I want with it, including removal of all ads. I did not enter a contract to accept your ads. Put your HTML behind a paywall. You won't do that because it will reveal the true market value of your 'content'. If this is how you 'get paid' find another line of work.
Do not allow advertising to pollute any realm of your experience. Life is too short.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by crafoo on Wednesday December 20 2017, @04:40AM
I think this is an entirely reasonable position to take. There are some sites that have paywalled content. A few of these sites actually make money on the deal too. My biggest complaint with advertisement money is that it incentivized so much trash and pollution in the world wide web. The internet at large is still doing OK, but 99% of web sites are borderline trashpiles that wouldn't exist if their wasn't an ad revenue trickle to suck on.
(Score: 5, Funny) by SomeGuy on Wednesday December 20 2017, @02:03AM
Hmm, "Coalition for Better Ads"? Sounds like it IS advertisers. Could be a good or bad thing, I mean if you think about it advertisers wan...
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It appears you have an ad blocker enabled. To read the rest of this insightful comment, you must disable your ad blocker, turn off system updates, disable your firewall, uninstall your virus scanner, and run around with your pants off so we can rape you up the butt whenever we freaking want to! TRUST US, IT WILL BE OK!
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(Score: -1, Troll) by realDonaldTrump on Wednesday December 20 2017, @03:04AM
Everybody in politics, everybody in business, has a message to get out. If nobody knows about you, you're nobody. Cambridge Analytica. Last year, I got my message out very well. With some help from Cambridge Analytica. Who made Brexit happen. Amazing results, amazing company. But politically correct bullshit, things like this, is making it harder.
The only card Crooked Hillary Clinton has is the woman’s card. She’s got nothing else to offer and frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don’t think she’d get 5 percent of the vote. The only thing she’s got going is the woman’s card, and the beautiful thing is, women don’t like her.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VanessaE on Wednesday December 20 2017, @04:15AM
Here's a message to the advertisers: fuck you and fuck your so-called "sustainability". The "web ecosystem" got along just fine before you started bombarding us with ads. We didn't need them then, and we sure a hell don't need them now!
You content producers/website owners want to get paid? Try selling things or services. You know, FUCKING EARN IT!
I don't owe you one red cent or a single second of my attention just because you cry about costs. - the web was meant to be free (other than my ISP's monthly cost of course) and publicly-accessible. Can't afford to be on the web? Buh-bye....and don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out.
...and yes, I pay for my dedicated server to be on the 'net, with a human-readable domain, running multiple public services, despite the small niche into which my services fit, and despite not making a single cent from them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 20 2017, @05:58AM (6 children)
That will qualify as a derivative work. Adblock gets away with it for a couple of reasons, that doesn't mean that if 90% of the internet does it that the powers that be wont decide to file a lawsuit just because they didn't sue adblock.
First, adblock is something YOU have to install on your computer. Chrome is installed automatically. Suddenly adding adblock without consent sounds like a third party modification to the page content, that's a problem, since it's a third party modification, rather than a first party modification, google might be on the hook for copyright infringement? Just my thoughts, IANAL.
(Score: 2) by jimshatt on Wednesday December 20 2017, @08:04AM
HTML is like a paint-by-numbers painting and you're free to use any color or any kind of paint you like.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 20 2017, @10:35AM (3 children)
You must be an Android user.
On all other platforms (Windows, Linux, OSX, IOS), Chrome is something YOU install.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 20 2017, @05:23PM
Even then, they can just make it an opt-out option that appears with a bunch of others on the first time you run/install it on a platform.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday December 21 2017, @06:13AM
Not exactly. I had never updated Chrome from some very early version. One day a fresh bright orange Chrome icon appears on my desktop -- how'd this happen? Turns out the updater for some other Google service did it, behind my back and without my permission, AND it hid the damn thing clear down in
F:\Documents and Settings\Rez\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe
Fucking asswipes.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1) by toddestan on Friday December 22 2017, @12:39AM
On Windows, Chrome is shovelware that often comes in with some other application you install if you aren't careful to deselect it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 20 2017, @02:54PM
Yes, the browsers should display the raw HTML source, as anything else is a modification of page contents.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 20 2017, @08:30AM
VentureBeat? Content? Never heard of 'em! Well, there's a failure of advertising right there! I should have been saying, "Oh, yeah, VentureBeat! The ones that derailed the train in Washington State!" Or, "Wow, VentureBeat! The serial killers that killed 23 people and was only caught because the ventured to beat!" You know, stuff like that, famous stuff. (Hello, VentureBeat, I expect my check in the mail, soon. Else more ads for you! You alleged pedophiles! )
(Score: 3, Insightful) by donkeyhotay on Wednesday December 20 2017, @03:54PM (1 child)
I don't block ads so much because ads are annoying. I block ads because I don't want malware. I hate web sites that say, "We get it. You don't like ads. But we promise that our ads are not annoying." No, you don't get it. I'm not blocking ads, I'm blocking malware.
Really, the whole argument that they can't run ads is ridiculous. These web sites are just lazy. I notice that, even with an ad blocker, plenty of clickbait shows up at the bottom. Those are ads. There is nothing to keep these web sites from including ads in their content, just like they do with the fake, clickbait articles. They just want to include a hook to an ad "service". They want to get income from ads, but they don't want to put any effort or expense into it -- including the effort to ensure that the ads don't contain malware.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 20 2017, @05:21PM
After years of trying to convince my family, I finally got them to install adblockers on their machines. They insisted they didn't need need one because they only went to "safe websites"; which was despite my insistence that there is no such thing. The last straw? They got hit twice by malvertising in a period of weeks. Once on a Yahoo! property and once on The New York Times. I was going to force one on them the second time, but they actually asked. Too bad they kept getting nailed, and my mother finally gave up and switched to a chromebook. Not that it has been trouble-free since then; maybe if you stopped disabling the thing so you could watch on seedy websites and actually updated your machine when prompted? At least chromebooks sync everything and I can powerwash from USB and reinstall in 5 minutes on the occasional breach.
Sorry that turned into a rant, but yes as more and more breaches for everyday people come from Malvertising, there will be more people who use try to block it. If you don't believe me, just look at the google trends and how there is a big jump every time a big site gets nailed.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Wednesday December 20 2017, @05:53PM
This "Coalition for Better Ads" needs to deal with a serious problem that ads are causing in aggregate: wasted bandwidth on auto-playing video ads. Seriously. It's not just a problem for people on slow networks. It degrades the whole internet for everybody. It puts lots of unnecessary strain on the ISP's infrastructure, which we all know they aren't interested in upgrading. And, of course, it eats up everybody's bandwidth caps.
But it's entirely possible that these ads are put out by the ISPs themselves for the explicit purpose of eating up bandwidth caps. For years I've been seeing 3-5 minutes long auto-playing ads that I honestly can't tell what they're advertising even after watching the whole damn thing. Bunch of feel-good shots with no context. They're like brand awareness ads without a brand to be aware of. The only explanation is that somebody wants to waste my bandwidth.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Wednesday December 20 2017, @11:32PM
Unless those rules of theirs also include a distinct vetting process *before* each and every ad is allowed on the network, I won't be disabling my ad-blockers anytime soon. These poorly managed ad networks are a major malware vector.