Websites owners, you are now being given a three-month notice to shape up or ship out. Since advertisements (ads) is the lifeline to your online presence, some of you have resorted to uncouth means to make sure your visitors to get to view (if not click through) advertisements on your site. Chrome is putting you on notice.
However, Google remains the biggest beneficiary of online ads, and to ultimately ban ads will be a self-defeating pursuit. If anything, Google is trying to do some damage control. You see most people who have installed third-party ad blockers were driven into doing so by those pesky pop-up ads; the unrelenting ads.
The problem with third-party ad blockers is they do not discriminate. They block everything; both pesky ads and ads which are just sitting at the corner of your web page; not particularly interfering with your ‘field of view.’ Blocking all ads simply translates to bad business for Google.
Again back to my earlier point, Google is simply trying to do some damage control. Since bad ads drive people to block all ads, which in turn negatively affects the search engine core business; advertisements.
You can be sure Google as a search engine and Chrome as a browser, both taking their lion’s share in their niche, can arm-twist all websites into complying with less disruptive ads format. News about Google working on integrating native ad blocker to Chrome first surfaced in April this year and has been available in beta since August. Come February 15th, next year the feature will be available in the stable version of the browser; available to every Chrome browser user.
“Starting on February 15, in line with the Coalition’s guidelines, Chrome will remove all ads from sites that have a ‘failing’ status in their Ad Experience Report for more than 30 days,” the blog by Chrome reads in part.
All these good ads, bad ads consciousness Google has developed recently is as a result of the company joining the Coalition for Better Ads. A consortium of online stakeholders who collectively want to see Better Ad Standards, across the internet. The consortium particularly wants to see the end of auto-playing videos, pop-ups, ads with countdown when the arrow is over them.