Back in June, Google announced that they are joining the Coalition for Better Ads and plan to stop Chrome from showing certain advertisements starting early 2018. On the 19th, the technology giant announced that this new feature will roll out on February 15, 2018. Starting mid-February, the Chrome browser will have a new in-built adblock. The group behind this initiative, Coalition for Better Ads, have done extensive consumer research and aim to make ads a better experience for everyone. ‘Better Ads Standards‘, the guidelines for acceptable ads, were released earlier this year and will go into effect fully in January 2018. Once the guidelines are enforced, advertising companies supporting the standard, including Google, will stop showing adverts that do not comply with the regulations.
Chrome will block all ads on websites that are blacklisted
The new standards are not meant to block all advertisements, rather they aim to stop the ones that make the ad experience particularly unpleasant for the user. The group have identified the types of advertisements that they are planning on blocking for desktop users as pop-up ads, auto-play video ads with sound, prestitial ads with countdown and large sticky ads. Pop-up ads, prestitial ads, ads with density greater than 30%, flashing animated ads, auto-play video ads with sound, poststitial ads with countdown, full-screen scrollover ads, and large sticky ads will be blocked for mobile.
Google has also developed a new feature called Ad Experience Report, which will essentially scan and create lists of website that violate the new standards. If a website is found to harbor intrusive advertisements, it will be blacklisted. If after 30 days the site still remains blacklisted, Google Chrome will block all of its ads.
Webmasters will be able to check whether their websites violate the regulations via Ad Experience Report, and if needed, stop intrusive ad behavior. If Chrome blocks all ads on a site and 30 days have already passed, site owners will have the option of asking for a review of their site in order to whitelist it.
It is speculated that the new ad blocking feature will come with Chrome 64 (released in January 2018), and the feature will be activated on February 15 for all users.