Google plans to add adblocking features to its Chrome browser, Wall Street Journal reports. They will appear in mobile and desktop Chrome, turned on by default, but will block only ads that are unacceptable by Better Ads standards. But these and other details are not clear yet, not only to Wall Street Journal but to Google itself.
The Better Ads standards have been developed by the Coalition for Better Ads, which unites large advertisers, publishers and ad-tech startups concerned by ad blocking growth. They have released a rating of ad experiences ranked by their tendency to annoy users and incline them to use ad blockers.
What will happen to ad blocking software market? We expect the audience of such apps to shift towards more advanced and experienced users, and people concerned about their privacy and personal information abuse. Google’s approach will not satisfy those who is unwilling to share their data with advertisers and other companies, as well as those for whom it’s important to see no ads at all.
If we want to predict some changes on the market, we can look what happens around Opera browser. In March 2016 ad blocking appeared there. Ad blocking Opera extensions are growing 30%-40% slower since then. The analogy is inaccurate, though -- Opera hasn’t turned ad blocking on by default, it needs to be activated in browser settings. On the other hand, it doesn’t exclude from blocking any “better ads”.
AdGuard as a premium software has always existed in a situation of competition with free products, and there are reasons to believe that its growth will not slow down.
Publishers and advertisers will need to adapt to the changes and review their inventory, getting rid of formats and tools that do not meet the Better Ads standards. Deprivation of some instruments, experiments with new ones and other adaptation measures may result in income decline and/or expenses growth.
Some will choose the path of least resistance and use the services of the Coalition’s for Better Ads participants. For example, websites will join Google AdWords.
We don’t expect Chrome to get the ad-blocking option within 3-4 months, but by the end of this year, the update with this feature will be released and received by all users. There will be a large and noisy media coverage. A majority of headlines will sound as if Google would have eliminated all ads in its browser, thus helping Google to perform the substitution of concepts described above, and replace ad blocking by “ad improving”.
Ad blockers had been invented and built in order to grant people control over what they see and experience in the Web. Over the data that they share with companies, over the limits of privacy that they can set for themselves. Selective ad blocking in Chrome is a way to give the control to Google.
This is arguably the biggest we’ve changed our app since v2.5 or even since the introduction of the new design back in Adguard v2.0. Some of these changes were meant to be introduced only in the 3.0 version, but we couldn’t wait any longer :) Significant changes to UI, the long hoped-for filtering log feature, other new options — all this and much more awaits you in this update.
This post is intended for more technically advanced users and meant to provide a detailed description on the HTTPS filtering and why it is essential in Adguard. The thing is, HTTPS is a very serious and sensitive subject, and we want to be as open here as possible.