Google is setting new restrictions on the display of advertisements during the videos displayed on its platform.
Chrome blocks ads that play through videos up to 8 minutes in length, and YouTube (app) will not show these ads before the videos start, Google said in a post published earlier today.
This is part of a gradual repression of ads on Google, which wants to prevent people from feeling uncomfortable with too many ads being displayed, while relying on advertising revenue to fuel their huge businesses. YouTube has generated $ 15 billion in revenue in the past three months from Google.
Chrome and YouTube will also no longer allow ads longer than 31 seconds, if they cannot be ignored within the first 5 seconds. Chrome will start blocking these ads from August 5th.
Long, non-skippable pre-roll ads (one of the types of ads that will no longer be shown on videos less than 8 minutes long)Overlay ads on the video that are placed in the middle of the video or that occupy more than 20% of the video area are also prohibited. The rules are based on the latest guidelines from the Coalition for Better Ads, which, in turn, are based on a survey of 45,000 people in eight countries.
Ads can be distracting, consume your monthly mobile data, impact your device's battery consumption, and even deliver malware. As a result, many people install ad blockers or ad block browsers.
Increasingly, however, there is a concern about advertisements as they bring with them trackers that invade users' privacy and monitor their online behavior.
Changing the video is not Chrome's first ad repression. Two years ago, Chrome started blocking intrusive ads on websites. This may have come as a surprise, as Google itself provides many of these advertisements to its own and third-party sites, but Google seeks to protect Chrome users from the most annoying situations.
And that seems to have been a positive thing for Google: after Chrome started blocking some ads on sites, "we saw ad blocking rates in North America and Europe drop significantly on Chrome," said Jason James, product manager Chrome, in the blog post.
Other changes are coming sooner to protect Chrome users. Starting with Chrome 80, launched on Tuesday, the Google browser starts to control pop-ups that request permission to send notifications to the user. In some circumstances, these pop-ups will be less invasive.
You may be able to switch Chrome to a quieter approach, but Chrome will enable it on its own for people who normally block these permission requests and for sites that few people grant notification permission to, said Google. And Google will gradually use the new interface more in future versions of Chrome.
Chrome 80 also changes the way websites can instruct the browser to store cookies. Cookies are useful for remembering that you are connected to a website, but they can also be used to track you and can open some security holes. To improve security, Google is changing the way Chrome handles a cookie setting called SameSite.
This caused some problems for the developers. Google continues with some caution, releasing only the SameSite change "for a small part of users" to begin with.
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