It’s official : Google Chrome to block ads by default

Important note: This blog was originally authored in June 2017. Since the, the Chrome ad blocker has become reality. You can find more up to date information about this here: Chrome ad blocking – what publishers need to know

An announcement on the DoubleClick blog last week has confirmed rumours that ad-blocking will be coming to Chrome in the near future. Unlike ad-blocking extensions this will ship as a default feature and is likely to be enabled by default for all of Chrome’s estimated 1 billion active users.

The announcement was made as part of a wider post about ad blocking and the new Funding Choices features:

Chrome has always focused on giving you the best possible experience browsing the web. For example, it prevents pop-ups in new tabs based on the fact that they are annoying. In dialogue with the Coalition and other industry groups, we plan to have Chrome stop showing ads (including those owned or served by Google) on websites that are not compliant with the Better Ads Standards starting in early 2018.

Whilst this might sound shocking, we wrote about Why default ad-blocking in Chrome might be good news for publishers back in April and genuinely believe that this is the right move to support the long-term prospects for web publishers.

The coalition mentioned in the post if the Coalition for Better Ads, an industry group that includes Google and other stakeholders in the digital advertising world. The CBA has propose better ads standards based on research they have conducted into the ad experiences deemed negative by users.  In particular they highlight 12 specific ad formats that most annoy users. These are likely to form the basis of the types of ads that Chrome will start blocking in 2018.