Google's Chrome Ad Blocking Arrives Tomorrow (theverge.com)

Google is enabling its built-in ad blocker for Chrome tomorrow (February 15th). From a report: Chrome's ad filtering is designed to weed out some of the web's most annoying ads, and push website owners to stop using them. Google is not planning to wipe out all ads from Chrome, just ones that are considered bad using standards from the Coalition for Better Ads. Full page ads, ads with autoplaying sound and video, and flashing ads will be targeted by Chrome's ad filtering, which will hopefully result in less of these annoying ads on the web. Google is revealing today exactly what ads will be blocked, and how the company notifies site owners before a block is put in place. On desktop, Google is planning to block pop-up ads, large sticky ads, auto-play video ads with sound, and ads that appear on a site with a countdown blocking you before the content loads. Google is being more aggressive about its mobile ad blocking, filtering out pop-up ads, ads that are displayed before content loads (with or without a countdown), auto-play video ads with sound, large sticky ads, flashing animated ads, fullscreen scroll over ads, and ads that are particularly dense.

Comments

Anti competitive

[ickleberry]

Google can basically redefine what they deem as an acceptable ad (ones made by themselves) on the fly. This is bad news.

Re:Anti competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

Google can basically redefine what they deem as an acceptable ad (ones made by themselves) on the fly. This is bad news.

If they start blocking competitors for anti-competition reasons then they will be breaking laws. They have a near monopoly situation and the European Union, as one example of places where laws are still enforced, has already made judgements against them.

The reason that Google is doing this is simple. The advertising industry has become so dangerous and dirty, serving malware and other garbage, that a computer without an ad-blocker installed is a clear security risk and most major companies are coming to realise that. In recent years malvertising has become one of the leading methods to attack companies. As other ad-blockers go mainstream Google's main business, selling advertising space, is being threatened. This is more or less the last throw of the dice for the advertising industry

Re:Anti competitive

[AmiMoJo]

Google is using Easylist, the same blocking list that uBlock and most others use. The only difference is that Google only enables blocking on sites that they have determined contain abusive ads. The determination seems to be a distributed thing, based on user's actions and reports. That's usually how Google works for stuff like malware warnings, they don't want to be doing manual checks.

I don't really buy the idea that they will start blocking everything but their own ads. Apart from getting them severely punished by regulators (the EU isn't afraid to hit them for billions of Euros) the same argument could have been made 10 years ago when Chrome launched with malware protection. Google could have marked Firefox as malware, same as Microsoft could mark Linux ISOs as malware in Windows Defender. It just doesn't seem to be an issue, probably because of the previously mentioned consequences.

Re:Anti competitive

[sg_oneill]

Its kind of critical at the moment.

A friend of mine is a journalist who makes his living off the website he writes for now that the newspaper it sprung out of has died. That means he's 100% dependent on ads to pay the rent (The sites fairly opposed to paywalls). So understandably he's got a bee in his bonnet about ad blockers.

My self on the other hand actively advocate people using full strength no exception ad blocking, simply because I've had on more than one occasion been pwned by zero days sprung out of advertisements dropping malware on my machines without my consent. In the current deeply unethical state of internet advertising, its just too dangerous to permit ads in my browsers.

And so we have a problem. Because without good writers and content makers being able to make a living off their trade, we're going to lose a lot of the good content on the net to paywalls, and a lot of content makers are simply going to quit. And thats BAD for the internet.

So maybe companies like Google and Apple laying smackdowns on badvertising , despite the conflict of interests involved might be what it takes to save the internets content infrastructure from the slow death that losing advertising might bring

Translation

[sjbe]

"While the Coalition’s consumer research was designed to identify the least preferred ad types, it also provides insight into consumers’ evaluation of a far broader range of ad experiences, including those more preferred by consumers.

"More preferred" actually translates as "less hated". Nobody actually prefers ads, they just hate some types more than others.

Re:Translation

[tepples]

People prefer ads to the other two possibilities: having to buy a 1-month subscription for $5.99 just to read one article, or the article not existing in the first place because the publisher went bankrupt. (I'm interested to read your fourth option.)

Re:Will websites start blocking Chrome?

[phantomfive]

Forbes does that (if you have adblocker installed, you can't visit their site). They seem to be happy with it.

For me the end result is that I don't visit their site. And nothing of value was lost.

Re:Fox guarding the hen house?

[dromgodis]

Are you saying that Google actually runs ads like those being discussed?

Youtube has "ads that are displayed before content loads (with or without a countdown)".