Online advertising: more or less

Publication date: 13 February 2020

Google to block annoying ads

Google’s Chrome web browser will start blocking annoying and intrusive ads that run before and during videos from August 5, 2020.
Restrictions will only apply to videos less than 8 minutes in length.

What types of ads will be blocked?

• Pre-roll ads or groups of ads longer than 31 seconds that cannot be skipped within the first 5 seconds.
• Mid-roll ads of any duration.
• Image or text ads that appear on top of a playing video and are in the middle 1/3 of the video player window or cover more than 20 percent of the video content.

The new standards might negatively affect YouTube’s ad revenue.

• Read also: What formats are among leaders in ad market?

Mail.ru to introduce in-image ads
Relap, a native ad service owned by Mail.ru Group, has introduced a new in-image ad format. Ad units run right on top of images which a user is looking at.
Relap uses computer vision to scan images, and, for example, advertizes electronics in images of laptops or smartphones. Content surrounding images is also analyzed.
The company believes that its new in-image ad format will help to overcome “banner blindness”—a phenomenon where users stop paying attention to banner ads.