Google announced on their Chromium Blog that they have been working on a common complaint among Chrome users: annoying, intrusive ads. In 2018, they started removing the ads from websites that continually show intrusive ads that violate industry standards. Google also updated their own advertising to ensure they are not selling or serving the kind of ads that users find the most annoying.
Today, the group responsible for developing the Better Ads Standards, the Coalition for Better Ads, announced a new set of standards for ads that show during video content, based on research from 45,000 consumers worldwide.
The Coalition found that three ad experiences that people find to be particularly disruptive on video content that is less than 8 minutes long. They include: long, non-skippable pre-roll ads or groups of ads longer than 31 seconds that appear before a video and that cannot be skipped within the first 5 seconds; Mid-roll ads of any duration that appear in the middle of a video, interrupting the user’s experience; and image or text ads that appear at the top of a playing video and are in the middle 1/3 of the video player window or cover more than 20 percent of the video content.
The Coalition has announced that website owners should stop showing these ads to their site visitors in the next four months. Beginning August 5, 2020, Chrome will expand its user protections and stop showing all ads on sites in any country that repeatedly show these disruptive ads. Google wants people to know that YouTube.com, like other websites with video content, will be reviewed for compliance with the Standards.
Google points those who operate a website that shows ads to the Ad Experience Report. It is a tool that you can use to review your site for compliance with the new ad protections, and that helps publishers to understand if Chrome identified any violating ad experiences on your site.
Overall, I think this change will likely have an effect on those who have ads on their YouTube videos, which could potentially affect their earnings. That said, it appears that these changes are designed to enhance the experience of people want to watch a video – on any website – without being annoyed by intrusive ads.