Advertising
2 mins read

Chrome & YouTube will block intrusive ads in short videos

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Google has an interest in keeping ads effective and unblocked by users. In order to keep the internet a free market supported by ads, the company has decided to crack down on video ads playing in Chrome and YouTube content. Chrome will start blocking ads that are in videos under 8 minutes long, while YouTube will never show the ads at all.

The response of Google comes as an effort to keep users from getting annoyed on key platforms. Opinions collected from 45,000 users showed consumers found non-skippable ads to be particularly disruptive on videos under 8 minutes. The web relies on advertising revenue achieved by appealing to its general audience, so these disruptions have been noted. YouTube achieved $15 billion in revenue last quarter relying on advertising within its video content.

According to the Coalition for Better Ads, websites need to stop unnecessary and blatant interruptions like these or risk losing advertising completely. The ads noted as disruptive in short videos included three types:

  • Pre-roll ads longer than 31 seconds that could not be skipped within the first 5 seconds
  • Mid-roll ads of any length that interrupted the middle of the video experience
  • Image or text ads that appear during a video, taking up more than 20% of the video screen or across the middle 1/3 of the video content
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Chrome will begin enforcing new standards August 5, 2020. Sites that continue to show disruptive ads that do not meet Chrome’s new standards will have all ads blocked by the browser. AdSense and DoubleClick will update their product plans to meet the new Google compliance standards for video ads. YouTube will be “reviewed for compliance with the Standards” notes Google.

This isn’t the first ad crackdown from Google. In 2018, Chrome began blocking certain types of intrusive ads in an effort to reduce the most annoying situations for users. This has resulted in reducing the noise of many sites that were determined to feature too many ads.

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Michael Yeon, VP Marketing, Admiral

By Admiral
Admiral helps digital publishers grow visitor relationships via adblock recovery, per-site subscriptions, multi-site subscriptions, email subscriptions, social subscriptions, privacy consent and more, powered by Admiral’s one-tag, one-vendor, one visitor experience Visitor Relationship Management (VRM) platform.