The Coalition for Better Ads (CBA), which manages online advertising and ensures their improvement and the best user-viewer experience, announced some new rules for video ads that appear during the playback of short videos.
Google is one of the founding members of this coalition. It announced that in a few months the new CBA rules will begin to apply to its popular products, such as the Chrome browser , YouTube and its advertising platform .
According to Google's announcement, starting August 5, 2020, the Chrome browser will block all video ads that do not comply with these new rules.
The same will apply in the coming months for those that are displayed through Google's and YouTube's advertising platforms.
Google will conduct scans on websites and if there are ads that violate the new CBA rules it will notify the administrators.
If website owners/administrators do not make the necessary changes, video ads will be blocked by Chrome.
Which ads will be blocked according to the new rules?
The CBA deemed the following types of advertising as intrusive and unwanted and decided to block them:
Ads that appear before a video plays and cannot beskipped
Many times when we try to watch a video, an advertisement appears at the beginning, which we cannot skip. We must wait for it to finish before the video starts. The CBA judged that these ads are very annoying for most users. They often last more than 31 seconds. In other cases it is not necessary to watch the entire ad. After a few seconds the option to do the so‑called «skip ad» is provided. This is the first type of advertisement that will be blocked.
Ads during a video
These are the ads that appear suddenly, at the time we are watching a video. They vary in length, and many different ones can appear in the same video. All users consider them extremely annoying.
Ads that hinder the proper playback of a video
There are cases where an ad appears in the form of an image or text at the top or center of the screen while is playing . The result is that more than 20% of the content is hidden. This is the third type of ad that Chrome will block.
The CBA decided that these three types of ads are intrusiveafter conducting a survey of more than 45,000 consumers from eight countries. The rules were formulated based on the responses and complaints of the participants.
The new rules do not apply to videos longer than eight minutes.
