Google Chrome to block annoying video ads soon
Google revealed on Wednesday that the company's Chrome web browser will soon block certain types of video ads automatically going forward.
If you have been to video sites, you may have noticed that these sites use a variety of ads attached to videos. Ads may be displayed when you hit the play button or in the middle of videos. Some sites even overlay ads on the video frame.
A survey of 45,000 consumers by the Coalition of Better Ads identified three ad experiences in videos of 8 minutes or less that fall beneath the organization's Better Ads Standard. These are:
- Advertisement that is displayed in the middle of the video, called mid-roll ads.
- Advertisement that is displayed before the actual video that lasts longer than 31 seconds that cannot be skipped after the first 5 seconds.
- Advertisement that is displayed in the middle third of a playing video or is larger than 20% of the video content.
Starting on August 5, 2020, Google Chrome will expand the built-in content blocking functionality to take these new ad experiences into account. The browser will "stop showing all ads on sites in any country that repeatedly show these disruptive ads".
Google's own platform YouTube will "be reviewed for compliance with the standards" just like any other site on the Internet that has video content. YouTube introduced a new option to publishers in 2018 to make video ads unskippable.
Google started to integrate content blocking functionality in the Chrome browser in early 2018 to slow down the rising number of systems with installed ad-blockers. Since the company could not just integrate a full-blown ad-blocker in Chrome, as it would reduce Google's earnings significantly, it selected to try and reduce the number of "annoying" ad formats and types instead by using Chrome's and Google Searches might to enforce the changes on all sites on the Internet.
The main idea was to ban certain ad formats and types on the Internet, mobile and desktop, by blocking all ads on sites that still use these formats.
The new standards apply to videos of 8 minutes or less only and it does not include videos with multiple pre-roll advertisements provided that these ads are skippable after five seconds.
Closing Words
Less intrusive advertisement is always a good thing but the change is not going far enough in my opinion. Mid-video advertisement is as annoying in longer videos than it is in shorter videos as it breaks the immersion.
Now You: What is your take on the new standard and the enforcement of it?
If it’s animated in any way, then I don’t want it.
Category 4: You Tube vids that are mostly an ad with a short vid at the end. “Fix your (fill in the blank) computer problem” vids are typical, just clickbait, nothing useful.
Hard to see Google doing what they plan given the low priority Aug 2020 kickoff date and the difficulty of herding any of the vastly interconnected products they’ve spawned.
There are plenty of FF extensions and 3rd party apps that work fine squashing even mid video ads. The only reason Google would ever do anything about ads is if the current situation is affecting revenue; they’re an ad company, they have all these pesky shareholders demanding returns! Don’t play their game, play yours.
Before people think Google is going to save the planet, ask yourself. How does Google benefit? Browser based instead of website based ads.
Pretty no one thinks that.
Well everyone wants free stuff, right? I just ran across a site that will NOT let you access it until you get rid of the ad blocker(s).
What you complainers are doing is setting up websites to be pay ONLY. Advertising is part of life and you people see them constantly. Look at a cam that shows Times Square in NYC. All kind of adverts. Billboards plastered all over the place.
It seems the only ads you don’t like are the ones that are online?
You people have no idea how business runs, you just want free stuff without ads.
I really hope one day all internet sites go PAY ONLY. Then what are you people going to do? I guess getting out of the basement and working to pay for all of it? lol
I’d be happy if the mainstream news websites go behind paywalls and then eventually bankrupt.
There are many, many sites like that, even sites on which you have an account, can’t get past the entry block to log in.
I’ve had a WaPo account for over a decade. A year or so ago, their host implemented a blue screen of death side bar that claims I’m in private browsing mode although I never use private browsing. If I turn off my ad blocker, I still can’t get in not even if I try to register for a paid account. WaPo want me to submit browser info so they can fix the problem, LOL!!!! Sure, if they can block me, they already have what they need to unblock me.
Sporadically, the blue screen disappears, I can log in but can only post maybe one or two comments on an article before getting kicked out. During the holidays last year, all of the filtering was disabled; beginning of this year it’s back, strong as ever.
Really dumb, I’ve posted more than 10k comments on the site over the years and get many upvotes; pretty clear from the comments my intention is to contribute useful stuff. WaPo is an Amazon property, a trillion dollar cap corp; implementing filters that don’t work but still allow legions of Russian trools in is beyond stupid. That’s “tech,” machines communicating with machines, humans exist only to trigger machines, bizarre.
If I try to access Ask Woody through my VPN, I get a gibberish message I’m a suspected attack vector, try later. More “tech” nonsense.
And so on…
@ULBoom, you deserve it.
(1) You’re using Google Chrome, so you should be used to abuse.
(2) You log into the Washington Post, so they can track you & sell your information (including your posts) to your potential future employer, to your future insurance company (to profile you to put you in a higher premium group), etc.
(3) Your “trillion dollar” corporation (dead wrong, do an internet search for the net worth of Amazon), just lost the $10 billion dollar JEDI defense contract, due to their partisan politics & hatred for President Trump (who was found innocent of impeachment this week, & is enjoying his highest approval rating ahead of the 2020 Presidential election).
TLDR – you suck & you deserve it. Enjoy Google Chrome.
I was always willing to accept ads as the cost of a “free” web-browsing experience. However, in recent years, ads have made navigating and reading web pages incredibly difficult. Sometimes impossible, as in the cases where multiple auto-playing video ads crash browsers. Many websites today are messier than a teenager’s 2004 MySpace page.
” I was always willing to accept ads as the cost of a “free†web-browsing experience. ”
@ce
I agree, although I use uBO I don’t mind a pasted-background ad on a website. I will admit, I formerly disabled uBO on this site…well until the site was sold…(Sorry Martin)..anyway, aggressive, intrusive ad’s to get your “negative” attention is not acceptable.
Also, pardon me, off topic…I use FFv59.02 and it seems, and very recently the app: Buster: Captcha Solver for Humans no longer works for me. I tried a previous restore point going back a month, deleted, then re-downloaded FFv59.02 and still, no longer works..
Anyone else, use Buster Captcha? Any problems?
Thank you for allowing me off topic
if i catch you google google will apply rules on short videos and not always; therefore the title of the news is biased
now we got tools to prevent all those ads and even to avoid the anti adblock message
peace
“Annoying ads” means ads that are not from Google.
They could also stop autoplaying video. At the moment, only Firefox blocks autoplaying videos as well as autoplaying videos with sound.
Chrome only mutes the sound but silently autoplays the video. There is no setting in Chrome yet to prevent buffering/playing the video itself.
@Addy T.: Chrome without the Google tracking = Ungoogled Chromium.
That’s rich. One of the world’s biggest ad networks (Google) promoting its spyware browser (1) as a means to get rid of ads.
Firefox + uMatrix + uBlock.
I remember when uBlock wasn’t active and I visited YouTube. It was a completely different experience. The site felt unusable.
By the way, I often don’t watch videos online. I download them and watch them offline. You can download several videos at the same time, and quickly skip uninteresting parts when you watch them. MPC-HC BE has this neat preview feature in the seek bar.
(1) Even the Washington Post called it that way. My Firefox is as fast as Chrome, despite it’s full of extensions. Chrome is the ultimate pleb software, targeting people who also think that an “Xbox with gold cables” is faster and better. And I say that as someone who is hardly a Mozilla fanboy.
JDownloader or OpenWith extension + PotPlayer
You could use Nano Adblocker + Nano Defender too, they are forks of uBlock Origin with reduced memory footprint and more blocking capabilities.
Same could be said about Chrome + Nano ADB + Nano DEF. I don’t even have to use an extension to block pop-ups, because these two block everything.
You can always copy-paste YouTube links into your video player and avoid the ads and gain better control over the video.
> You could use Nano Adblocker + Nano Defender too, they are forks of uBlock Origin with reduced memory footprint and more blocking capabilities.
Lies, Nano Adblocker is a fork of uBO with few new changes and the rest literally the same, thats all. Nano Defender doesn’t even get updates anymore and the project is dead. Atleast check your facts before you spam here, newbie.
Very useful comment, it helped me a lot, thanks.
All ads are SATAN, all of them. Not one single person in the history of the universe has bought anything he/she/it saw in an ad that popped up anywhere on the screen before that twerking video at any time, ever. Necessary evil? Nope, SATAN. SATAN FROM HELL. Iuse adblocking, I use a hosts file, I use anything that tries to fight back even a little bit. Without it the whole damn internet is unusable. Greed is the root of all evil.
Ads are parasitism, emblematic of rotting stage capitalism, meant to induce fake needs, generating a purely wasteful unproductive arms race between competing vendors, and paid by the consumer buying the product as an extra cost. All those billions could have been invested in serving the humanity’s actual needs, but weren’t.
Ads have contributed to the destruction of the free press. They have considerable influence on what the press can or not say. Furthermore they have made actual objective information indistinguishable from paid disinformation.
Ads are destroying culture. Cultural production is turning into product/idea placement.
Ads have destroyed privacy. For ad targeting to be efficient, they have turned our society into a dystopian surveillance nightmare that is digger deeper in horror every year.
Ads have generated trillion dollar monster companies like Google that nothing can stop any more.
Ads are evil, indeed.
Here! Here!
At first thought “evil” is hyperbole. But I checked the dictionary – and it fits!
You make no sense. Greed means that they make from ads. How they make money from ads because of their greediness and at the same time not one single person in the history of the universe has bought anything he/she/it saw in an ad?
Advertising does NOT work like Company SuperBunghole places an ad on Company Greedy Arse Inc. website and then pays them a percentage for every sale they make via their ad on said website. Greedy Arse Inc. get paid just by having the ad on their website.
It doesn’t make sense. Do you think Company SuperBunghole is stupid to pay money to Greedy Arse Inc. for no reason? Do you think they are that stupid? Why don’t they give them to charity if they don’t benefit from it lol.
Google could first remove autoplaying ads video on 3/4 screen in the youtube tv app
https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/11/25/youtube-is-putting-massive-autoplaying-ads-on-its-tv-apps/ I don’t think that this ad would stick to standards Coalition of Better Ads.