While the title seems outrageous and click-baity, yes. You read that right.
CNN Tech:
The move comes more than eight months after the company announced plans to automatically block ads that don’t ascribe to the Better Ads Standards, a collection of best practices to make ads less annoying. Starting Thursday, Chrome will block the following on desktop: ads that take over the browser, pop-up ads, autoplay videos with sound, and large sticky ads that take over the bottom of the screen and don’t move.
Better Ads Standards defines big banner ads with skipping time, Autoplay Video ads, etc. as bad ads. These are no doubt user hostile and need to be eliminated. While the move from Google to block these kind of ads is largely appreciable, a leading digital advertiser deciding which ads are good and which are bad is problematic. (Google is a board member in the Better Ads Standards Organisation)
The Ad Blockers are on the rise and according to PageFair, 615 million devices use Ad Blockers of some kind which is approximately 11% of the internet population. This is certainly an area of concern for Google and so, this move. It makes complete business sense for Google to penalise these kind of Publishers with unpalatable ads so that people start staying away from Ad Blockers and as a result the internet population that Google can serve ads grows. Google resorting to this step of blocking annoying ads inspite of friction with publishers suggests that their internal research showed people use ad blockers because they are annoyed with the on-the-face ads and not concerned of privacy. So, will the use of Ad Blockers come down after this move from Google? Only time will tell.
AMP Hell
Google’s one line mission/rule for Google Search is this:
“Put user first and rank the links on search based on what is best for user. Everything will follow.’
The move to block annoying ads, as described above largely benefit the users. In that sense, Google is doing what’s right. But Google’s decision to feature Accelerated Media Pages in mobile search ahead of normally rendered pages is questionable. When mobile internet was nascent and time to load mattered more than the user experience, AMP worked.
But AMP has questionable security risks – change of URL and User Interface (AMP doesn’t respect the iPhone UI of tap on top to go to top principle) problems. For me, a properly rendered web page is more convenient than an Accelerated Media Page. So, going back to the mission statement, “what is best for user,” Who is answering that question? Research? Or Engineers at Google deciding that AMPs are best?
Isn’t “best for the user” subjective and debatable? And so a problematic mission statement to have?
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