We believe online ads should be better. That’s why we joined the Coalition for Better Ads, an industry group dedicated to improving online ads. The group’s recently announced Better Ads Standards provide clear, public, data-driven guidance for how the industry can improve ads for consumers, and today I’d like to share how we plan to support it.
To that end, they are going to pre-install an ad-blocker in Chrome based on the Coalitions blacklist of annoying ads.
Chrome has always focused on giving you the best possible experience browsing the web. For example, it prevents pop-ups in new tabs based on the fact that they are annoying. In dialogue with the Coalition and other industry groups, we plan to have Chrome stop showing ads (including those owned or served by Google) on websites that are not compliant with the Better Ads Standards starting in early 2018.
Annoying is subjective. But I’m glad they’re doing something.
While they’re at it, it’d be cool if they added newsletter modal blocking too. We don’t see pop-up windows that much anymore (partly due to most modern browsers automatically blocking them by default). Nowadays we see pop-up "modals" for things like newsletter sign ups for a 10% discount. I think those are annoying and should be blocked too. Though we don’t see Chrome (or any other browser) blocking them by default yet.
I don’t understand attention hostile advertising. I work at a marketing and advertising company and I still don’t like these tactics. It isn’t a sustainable method. Imagine if newspapers in the 1800s could overlay the entire front-page of their papers with a guy fishing a Miller Lite out of a cooler? Print newspapers would have never made it as long as they did. Attention hostile advertising is a short-sighted approach. We need to think of ad units that are longterm, sustainable, and valuable to both customer and advertiser.