From today, users of Google Chrome, the most popular web browser in the world, will no longer see 12 types of online adverts which have been deemed to be “intrusive” by a group of advertising industry members
Leading that body, which examined 104 potential formats to determine which should be blocked and which should be allowed, is the world’s largest digital advertiser: Google.
I imagine you will be able to guess how many of Google’s ad formats were deemed by the group put together by Google to be too intrusive displayed by Google’s web browser.
Google has been clear from the start about its motivation for implementing adblocking into Chrome. In June last year, when it first announced the plan, the company said: “Over the years we’ve increasingly heard from users that while some types of advertising are fine, others can seem overwhelmingly frustrating or intrusive. Due to these poor ad experiences, the usage of extensions that block ads across the web continues to rise, up about 30% from just last year.”
From the point of view of a browser manufacturer, those statistics aren’t particularly scary. Hell, they can even be read as describing a potential competitive advantage: the importance of adblocking to many modern web surfers means that it’s risky to launch a new browser without a built-in adblocker.
But from the point of view of the largest digital advertiser, those figures are terrifying. According to analyst firm eMarketer, Google is estimated to bring in more than $40bn in ad revenues over the course of 2018, almost half the entire global $94bn market beating, Facebook into second place with $22bn.
For all Google’s massive spread of products, when it comes to revenues, the company is a huge ad business with a couple of smaller hardware and software projects attached – in 2017 about 85% of both Google and its parent company Alphabet’s revenue came from advertising.
Google had to move ...
Thanks to the scale of its empire, Google had the chance to attack the adblocking problem in a more effective way than some other ad-supported businesses were able to. It didn’t have to resort to blocking access to visitors using adblockers, or start mining cryptocurrency on their computers (with or without their permission) in order to ensure the continuation of its revenues. Instead, Google used its control of the majority of the browser market more directly.
The plan is simple, and almost explicit: block just enough adverts to make sure that people don’t feel the need to install an adblocker that will block them all. The only way to save the ad industry is to improve it, and the only way to do that is to cut off the most egregious offenders at the knees.
To do this, Google has put together an industry body – the Coalition for Better Ads (CBA) – to held decide what the most egregious offenders actually are. At its best this is a form of self-regulation by a sector eager to prove to users that it isn’t as bad as it can appear.
It’s the same basic argument as that made by a few other adblocking firms. While some adblockers simply block the entire industry, either arguing that the internet needs to replace its advertising-funded business model with something better or simply declaring that the economics of the web aren’t their problem, a few have taken a similar stance to Google.
Eyeo’s Adblock Plus, one of the largest desktop adblockers, runs its own Acceptable Ads programme, letting through a portion of adverts that have been deemed sufficiently unobtrusive.
Of course, the programme has been controversial for its own reasons: ABP charges larger companies a portion of their revenue to be placed on the acceptable list, leading to accusations of racketeering; Google is one of the companies paying the fees.
Unsurprisingly, the two approaches differ in where they draw the line. Of 54 ad formats tested by Eyeo, nine were deemed intrusive by the CBA, while the company’s own plugin declared 51 to be unacceptable.
A few weeks before Chrome’s blocker came out, Ben Williams from Adblock Plus told me: “If you look at it from a macro level, what the Coalition is trying to do is essentially dissuade people from using adblockers in the first place because the ad experience is so much better. Our approach is different, we assume that there are going to be people out there who want more rigorous adblockers.
“It’s OK that we have competing approaches. If the user is going to be ultimately the winner of this, then we’re OK. It’s an honest competition of ideas.”
Self-serving?
Even if the adblockers aren’t afraid of the competition, there are reasons to view Google’s entry into the market with some distaste. Other advertisers have called foul, with the Wall Street Journal noting that the Coalition for Better Ads is making some particularly self-serving decisions.
An exemption to the rule banning video ads that autoplay with the sound on allows Facebook to carry on running that format, for example, while a second exemption to the rule banning pop-up ads allows pop-up ad maker BounceX to carry on running them. Both companies are members of the Coalition.
One of the most disliked forms of advertising on the web, video pre-roll, is not included at all. Google, which ran the initial user experience testing to decide what users hated the most, didn’t look at adverts attached to videos, a decision whichsafeguarded the company’s estimated $4.4bn in annual revenue from YouTube.
Advertising remains unpopular on the internet, and few will weep too hard for an industry which has, in any telling of its history, backed itself into this corner through constant chasing of short term gains over long-term sustainability. But when a single company is large enough to become judge, jury and executioner for an entire sector, we should pause for thought before cheering as it passes sentence. The fox has formed a coalition to defend the henhouse, and it wants you to know everything is fine.
