The ad types that have been blacklisted by the Coalition for Better Ads include pop-ups, auto-playing video ads with sound and ads with countdown timers. All of these ads will are considered to be bad for the user experience and “beneath a threshold of consumer acceptability.” Google might end up banning the AdSense account of sites that display bad ads and this puts an additional burden on the web admins. The publishers have to ensure that all of their ads prescribe to the new standards else they will be in the fray. At the outset, the ad-blocking doesn’t seem to be a logical move as Google earns its major share of revenue by serving ads. The ad-blocking initiative might be a clever move to eliminate the ads that play spoilsport and thus strengthen their foundation when it comes to online ad revenues. Since most of the rivals including Opera and other third parties are already offering third party apps to block ads it is only natural for Google to respond with its own version. Yet another aspect of the ad-blockers is the possibility that most of them are offering to whitelist the ads, for a sum of money of course. The whitelisting of ads will further diminish the level playing ground for the publishers and give an upper hand to the larger corporates. As of now, nearly 26% of U.S users are using ad-blockers on their desktop. Google is already a part of “Acceptable Ads” program which is offered by a company called Eyeo GmbH and develops the popular ad blocking tool Adblock Plus. Chrome browser is the most popular browser and considering the user base Google will have a greater control over how ads are being served across the verticals. It will be interesting to see how Google’s ad-blocking feature will shape up and how this will affect publishers who depend on Google Adsense in general.
