Google confirms Chrome ad blocker coming in 2018

Google will design Chrome’s ad blocker to filter out ads that don’t meet those guidelines, the company announced on Thursday.

As a privacy campaigner pointed out previous year, the EU’s ePrivacy Directive only permits a publisher to run a browser script that checks for the presence of an ad blocker if the user has consented to it.

Google, the giant search engine has confirmed that next year that Chrome will come with built-in ad blocker technology which will restrict the annoying ads which cling to the website.

Those standards mean video ads that play automatically with sound, no pop-up ads, no ads that occlude web content until a timer finishes counting down, and no large ads that cover large portions of a website even as you scroll up or down.

Ad-blockers take “a big toll” on publishers and producers who rely on advertising revenue, said Sridhar Ramaswamy, Google’s senior vice-president in Ads and Commerce. The Coalition also gives guidance for web developers and the industry as a whole for how to improve their ad experiences.

Google is giving its publishers a six-month head start to prepare for the new ad blocker by circulating a tool called the Ad Experience Report. Some ignored the report because Google is making billions from online advertising and to them it just didn’t make sense. This results in the person blocking ads on all the websites they visit and Google feels there is a better solution to the whole thing.

It’s going to be good news for many Chrome users as some of the worst ad offenders have made the CBA’s “unacceptable” list, which was released in March. Through the feature, publishers can show a message to readers who have enabled a third-party ad blocker encouraging them to either enable ads or pay a small fee to go ad-free. This includes Google’s own ads, which is an interesting decision.

Ads are critical to any site.

The ad blocker will be activated default on chrome browsers and apply to both mobile and desktop devices.

Funding Choices is available to publishers in North America, U.K., Germany, Australia and New Zealand and will be rolling out in other countries later this year.

With several major advertisers boycotting Google over extremist content being published next to their ads, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is under pressure to not only clean up its advertising, but also its content.

As you may recall, The Wall Street Journal claimed that Google was planning to add native ad-blocking functionality to its flagship Chrome web browser.