Tag: Adverts

In a blog post yesterday, Google clearly and carefully outlined their plan for blocking overly aggressive adverts on the web.  At first blush, it would seem odd that Google, a company who primarily makes their money from adverts, would block ads.  Further, it would seem self serving as the types of adverts they want to block in Chrome, they themselves don’t serve up so only their ads would get through the blocker.  That’s not entirely true.

As a site owner who depends on adverts and as a consumer, I’m quite happy with this announcement and planned implementation in 2018.

The short of it is this:  In Google Chrome, starting in 2018, overly intrusive adverts are going to be blocked by the browser.  As Google described them, “it’s far too common that people encounter annoying, intrusive ads on the web–like the kind that blare music unexpectedly, or force you to wait 10 seconds before you can see the content on the page. These frustrating experiences can lead some people to block all ads–taking a big toll on the content creators, journalists, web developers and videographers who depend on ads to fund their content creation.”

We all know examples of sites that use these types of ads and as a consumer, I hate them.  I never block the ads but I just don’t go to those sites any more.  And that hurts me in getting the information I want or need and ultimately, it hurts the site as they don’t get revenue from their ads.

You may want to put your shocked face on because it looks like Facebook is going to start putting ads in Facebook Messenger.

That was sarcasm folks.

The company announced today that they are going to begin testing ads in Messenger in Thailand and Australia with businesses having the option to have their products advertized below your recent conversations in the app.  It is a small start and really, it makes a lot of sense for Facebook to do this, like it or not.  Facebook Messenger has over a billion users per month which makes it an ideal platform to surface ads.