One of the biggest gripes with the internet and just general browsing have been online ads. You know the ones I’m talking about; pop-up ads, video ads, and all kinds of different ways people have been trying to monetise the internet over the years. But now, The Coalition for Better Ads (CBA), who is an industry group dedicated to improving the state of online ads, have announced new rules for ads displayed on ‘short-form’ videos. This means videos that are under eight minutes.
Google is one of the founding members of the CBA, so naturally, they’ll take some steps to implement these rules. They’ve officially announced plans to implement the rules into their own products such as:
- The Chrome web browser
- Their advertising platform
- YouTube
From August 5th 2020, Google says Chrome will use internal ad-blocking capabilities to block all video ads that don’t follow the new rules. This includes video ads that run through Google’s ad platforms, as well as on YouTube. Google will scan websites in these coming months, and if they’re associated with a Google Search Console account, they’ll be notified if any of their video ads break the new CBA rules for short-format video ads.
If they don’t comply, their videos ads will be blocked in Chrome, effectively demonitising their videos for all Chrome user – which is almost 60% of ALL internet users. I mean, come on, you’d be an idiot not to listen to the rules.
These are the three new undesirable ad formats:
Long pre-roll ads that can’t be skipped:
Ads which are non-skippable pre-roll ads or groups of ads longer than 31 seconds that appear before a video starts, and can’t be skipped in the first 5 seconds.
Mid-Roll Ads:
A mid-roll ad is a video ad experience that plays in the middle of a selected video, interrupting the content. This I feel, is the worst of them all. It totally ruins the viewing experience, especially if they’re a looong ad. And I’m not the only one to think so.
Large Display Ads:
These refer to ads that are image or text ads that appear on top of a video and are in the middle 1/3 of the video player window or covers more than 20% of the video content.
The CBA reached the conclusion that these three video ad formats are intrusive, based on market research which consisted of a group of more than 45,000 consumers, from eight countries, and represents 60% of global online advertising spending.
However, something to keep in mind for now is that this applies to videos 8 minutes or shorter, and videos longer than that, still are susceptible to the type of ads I mentioned above. So it’s not an all encompassing rule, but it’s a start to stopping annoying ass ads, because the truth of the matter is, no one likes ads, especially intrusive, distasteful ones. It’s a step in the right direction so at least it’s that.
