The Coalition for Better Ads announced this week announced a new set of standards for ads that appear during video content.
The American-base industry group dedicated to improving the state of online ads, together with one of its founding members Google, announced plans Feb. 5 to implement the new rules across Chrome and YouTube.
Of the different types of ads that are displayed before, during, or after a video, people find three ad experiences to be particularly intrusive on video content with a length of fewer than eight minutes, according to research carried out by the Coalition for Better Ads.
The first category of ads that consumers find extremely disruptive is the one which includes groups of ads longer than 31 seconds that appear before a video and are non-skippable for the first five seconds, or the long, non-skippable pre-roll ads.
The second category is one with ads of any duration that roll during a video, interrupting the experience of the users.
The third category includes image or text ads that show on top of a playing video and cover over 20 per cent of the video content or are in the middle one-third of the video player window.
The coalition has announced that website owners should stop showing these ads to consumers in the next four months.
Chrome will be following the Coalition’s lead in order to enhance the experience for people browsing the web and to address what it says is a “common complaint among Chrome users” – intrusive ads.
“Following the Coalition’s lead, 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,” Chrome noted in a blog post. “It’s important to note that YouTube.com, like other websites with video content, will be reviewed for compliance with the Standards. Similar to the previous Better Ads Standards, we’ll update our product plans across our ad platforms, including YouTube, as a result of this standard, and leverage the research as a tool to help guide product development in the future.”
Starting this week, Chrome will update the Ad Experience Report with information to help website operators or publishers find solutions to any issues they face with the new video standards currently on their site.
The news comes two days after the Google Chrome web browser, version 80, was made available for download on all major platforms, which brought about some significant changes.
The first of which was made to the way Chrome handles cookie files, a browser staple for more than two decades.
Chrome says it will begin to put in place a secure-by-default cookie classification system, which Google says will boost privacy and security for Chrome users going forward.
The new feature is available as of Chrome 76 by enabling the same-site-by-default-cookies flag.
The use of non-secure cookies makes pervasive monitoring, a widespread attack on the privacy and security of the users, easy, says Google.
“This change will mitigate the risks presented by pervasive monitoring by curtailing the use of non-Secure third-party cookies,” Chromium explained on its website.
Google has also changed how Chrome handles notification popups, as all notification requests will be hidden under an icon in the address bar.
Chrome will begin enforcing the new cookie classification system in Chrome 80 later in February with a small population of users, which will gradually increase over time.
The SameSite Updates page can be monitored for updates on the timing and process of the rollout.
To see if your browser has been updated, you can visit this page; if all the rows are green then your browser is applying the new defaults.