By now you might have heard of Adblock, one of those browser extensions with the stop sign icon that stops those “pesky” ads appearing in front of your favorite videos and on your favorite websites. Less and less people, however, are using these blocking extensions due to better marketing.
The rates of users adding advertisement blocking extensions to their browsers hit its peak 3 years ago, and the declining numbers are mostly due in part to the Coalition for Better Ads. This coalition began with representatives from Google, Facebook, Unilever, as well as 32 other members as an initiative to support Internet advertising while making ads less intrusive for consumers. Their work has led to significant adaptations in media marketing; many advertisements on Youtube now have the “skip” feature after 5 seconds, or are otherwise less than 20 seconds.
Coming August 5th 2020, Google Chrome is rolling out new standards for advertisements featured in “short form” video content. Any video less than 8 minutes long qualifies as “short form.” Chrome will stop showing ads on sites that “repeatedly show these disruptive ads,” effective globally.
Advertisements considered “disruptive” for short form videos are categorized as the following:
- Mid-roll ads of any duration.
- Pre-roll ads or ads longer than 31 seconds which cannot be skipped in the first 5 seconds.
- Text or display ads that appear in the middle third of a playing video or are larger than 20% of the video content.
The new Chrome standards for the pre-roll advertisements seem to be aligned with Youtube’s TrueViews ads, which allow users to skip after the first five seconds. Bumper ads, which are unskippable but only 6-seconds long, won’t be affected either. There may be some changes to the appearance of display banners on YouTube videos, but otherwise, mid roll ads and mid-third ads seem to be the only categories of video advertisement which will be hit heavily by these new standards.
