Google has announced that its Chrome browser will block all “disruptive” ads that are displayed alongside short-form videos of eight minutes duration or less, while it also reviews its own websites, such as YouTube, for compliance.

The tightened policy will come into force on August 5th and meets newly released guidance from the Coalition for Better Ads, a cross-industry body formed in 2016 to improve consumers’ experience with online advertising.

After conducting a survey of 45,000 consumers across eight countries representing 60% of global online adspend, the coalition this week identified three types of ad that it said do not meet its Better Ads Standard for short-form video. These include:

  • Pre-roll ads or pods longer than 31 seconds that cannot be skipped within the first five seconds.
  • Mid-roll ads of any duration that appear in the middle of a video, interrupting the user’s experience.
  • Image or text ads that appear on top of a playing video and are in the middle third of the video player window or cover more than 20% of the video content.

“The Coalition for Better Ads is pleased to add this new standard to our tools to help the online ad industry improve the experience for consumers,” said Neal Thurman, director of the Coalition for Better Ads.

“Broadening the environments covered by our Better Ads Standards will benefit consumers and provide additional guidance for businesses to respond to consumer preferences,” he added.

Google, a founding member of the coalition, responded in a blog post that it would adopt these standards in full and “will expand its user protections and stop showing all ads on sites in any country that repeatedly show these disruptive ads”.

“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,” added Jason James, Google product manager.

Chrome’s dominance of the search market, especially in the US, means that Google in effect will demonetise those sites that fail to deal with ads that do not meet the required standard.

And it comes less than a month after the company surprised the digital advertising industry after announcing that it would begin phasing out third-party cookie tracking on its Chrome browser over the next two years.

Sourced from Google, Coalition for Better Ads; additional content by WARC staff