Chrome has always focused on giving users the best possible experience browsing the web. For example, Chrome, like other browsers, prevents pop-ups in new tabs based on the fact that they are annoying. Today, we have an even better understanding of the types of experiences that bother users when it comes to unwanted advertising. New public, consumer-driven research done by the Coalition for Better Ads in creating the Better Ads Standards outlines a number of these experiences, such as full-page ad interstitials, ads that unexpectedly play sound, and flashing ads. In dialog 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.
Interesting that this will also block Google’s ads. I’ll still feel more comfortable with third party blockers, though.
They are only blocking ads if they don’t follow “Better Ads Standards”. It’s probably a good idea for the branding of their own ad product to do that. A case where what’s good for users happens to also be good for them.
Given that “Prestitial Ads with Countdown” are on the list of “below threshold” techniques, I wonder if they’ll split hairs and argue that YouTube is exempt “because video”.
Edited 2017-06-04 09:26 UTC
ssoklow,
Being both the advertiser and ad-blocker is an obvious conflict of interest.
When Adblockpro started taking fees from advertisers to let certain ads onto a whitelist, users were able to opt-out of the whitelist, will google offer the same kind of opt-out? In other words can users block all the ads they don’t want or is the ad whitelist mandatory?
I suspect google’s motivation here is to retake control over users they lost to ABP, adaway, uBlock, etc with a new blocker that doesn’t block their own ads.
Sums it up well.
I don’t think it’s a conflict of interest at all. They know that the abusive way many sites push ads is driving people away. Their ads loose value the more people resort to ad-blockers.
You would be much less inclined to install an ad-blocker if they were not intrusive overbearing resource hogs. Enforcing a certain level of decorum in the presentation of ads is a means to shore up the value of those ads to the advertisers.
You have to hand it to Google for having the common sense to know that trying to circumvent ad-blockers would only make the situation worse. So in a sense the ad-blocking advocates won: They’ve made a compelling case that got Google’s attention and has prompted them to make changes.
FishB8,
Many of us block google because we don’t want them tracking us, and to this end google is one of the worst offenders around: tracking us across disparate domains and devices, collecting user data and even our private credit card transactions. It’s the same reason I’m morally opposed to what windows has become. They’ve crossed boundaries that, for me, are unacceptable. And while my resistance may be futile, I’ll be damned if I don’t try.
I wish more website owners would consider that privacy is a big reason many savvy users are blocking the 3rd party ads. Take osnews for example, if they didn’t show google ads here, I’d be less inclined to block them. I wouldn’t block first party ads at all since my moral opposition to 3rd party tracking no longer applies, heck I might even click on those links if I new the money was going to osnews directly. However as is, I personally will not unblock google for anyone.
Edited 2017-06-05 03:31 UTC
You miss my point. To be blunt, google does not care much about you, or others actively concerned with personal privacy. It’s the 99% of internet users who’s threshold of taking action does not extend past simple annoyance. Eliminate the annoyance and most people’s response to tracking is “meh” so long as they don’t feel inconvenienced. So long as Google doesn’t use that information is a way that pisses the 99% off, nothing will change. The second they screw up and abuse the info they’ve been collecting in a way that sufficiently upsets the 99%, things will change in a hurry.
FishB8,
Your stats are off, there are way more than 1% of users who have actively installed ad blockers (for whatever reason). And furthermore what makes you think I missed the point that google doesn’t care about what I think? I’m well aware of that. I don’t think we’re getting our privacy back from the tech companies that have taken it away.
You and Alfman are thinking of different reasons of what this ‘interest’ might be in the conflict of interest.
You think it’s just people being annoyed by obtrusive advertisements, but just like Alfman said, the reasons are much broader and more subtle: some people don’t like ANY ads. Some people don’t like to be tracked by (for them) unnecessary third party domains/servers, etc.
Therein lies the conflict of interest: some people don’t want anything to do with ads, nor with people or companies who endorse them or make profits out of them. They want ads being blocked by a piece of software where they themselves have been the major (and only) stakeholder, not some ad-company.
Bear in mind that ad-blocking is correlated with the growth of targeted advertising and retargeting.
This excellent piece looks at it in terms of various things, such as biological signalling theory and historical observations in advertising.
http://zgp.org/targeted-advertising-considered-harmful/
There are far too many good points to summarize, but one example is that recognizably untargeted ads, like print ads, are like a peacock’s tail. (They tell potential buyers that you’re such a genuine article that you can survive giving yourself a big handicap. Same as peacock tails and the displays antelopes put on when they spot predators.)
One piece of advice it gives is for sites to reward users who use extensions which allow ads, but interfere with their tracking mechanisms (ie. cookie-blocking, User-Agent randomization, etc.), so advertisers can’t just buy ads on cheaper sites for users whose interests were identified on theirs.
Edited 2017-06-07 12:41 UTC
The main reason I block ads is because majority of them offends my eyes. In some cases, I can feel my brain hurting from the overload of random, out of place visuals (and animations, and sometimes even audio) that don’t go together the slightest bit.
Or in case of OSNews, when otherwise text-only page gets huge blobs of random imagery splattered all over it. I really like clean, text-only pages, and putting visual ads on them ruins their design completely.
Exactly…
I never used to block google’s text based ads, and didn’t mind static graphical ads too much either… But once ads with sound and animation started cropping up i looked for ways to block them.
I don’t like ads that are intrusive with sound or animation, which get in the way (some modern script-heavy ads cause rendering problems with pages), or which consume ridiculous amounts of bandwidth (sometimes i’m on a slow and/or metered connection)… The more intrusive ads become, the more likely people are to seek ways of blocking them.
This actually should (in theory at least) help in the long run with one of the two reasons that I use an Ad-blocker, namely that I’m tired of the crap that they’re listing as problems in their standards. I’m especially looking forwards to this on the Mobile version of Chrome, since most sites mobile versions have only advertisements that fail at least one criteria.
Unfortunately, nothing is going to deal with the other reason, as even Google can’t figure out how to serve me ads that are actually relevant to me (I’m seriously sick of seeing Linode ads in Google Ads spots given that I already use Linode and that seems to be the only thing Google has figured out about me).
https://brave.com/
By the guys that were at firefox, a browser using chromium as a base, but adding in add blocking and user tracking by default.
Also, Thom, & David. I’d love to see osnews support the Brave Payments system. I’d love to easily pay more to you than my intermittent clicking of relevant ads that are severed on the site.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
I hadn’t heard about it, thanks for the link.
I’ve installed it on windows, but it doesn’t like my computer for some reason. It pegs the CPU high and all my fans ramp up when everything should be idle. When I try to interact it goes to “not responding” and I have to kill it. I might give them another shot when they update it, but so far it works well on android.
I mostly use FF and sometimes SR-Iron, which is another chromium fork.
Yeah, its pretty stealthy considering the players involved. I have linux issues with certain job critical sites not working. No idea why. But for not work, most sites work fine. I really want to make that my default browser.
From the name of it, this sounds like a web browser from Apple, with address bar permanently removed.