NEW YORK — Google will now block annoying ads on its Chrome browser.
The move comes more than eight months after the company announced plans to automatically block ads that don’t ascribe to the Better Ads Standards, a collection of best practices to make ads less annoying.
Starting Thursday, Chrome will block the following on desktop: ads that take over the browser, pop-up ads, autoplay videos with sound, and large sticky ads that take over the bottom of the screen and don’t move.
On mobile, ads that will be blocked include those with flashing animation, ads displayed before the content is loaded, and full-screen scroll over ads.
But the company said it won’t block all ads, only those deemed most intrusive by researchers at the Coalition for Better Ads. Over 40,000 people took part in surveys to determine the worst offenders.
“By focusing on filtering out disruptive ad experiences, we can help keep the entire ecosystem of the web healthy, and give people a significantly better user experience than they have today,” Chrome Vice President Rahul Roy-Chowdhury said in a blog post this week.
Google said it will rate websites as passing, warning, or failing, and alert websites to violations. Site owners can access the evaluation through a Google tool and can ask to be reviewed again once they address the bad ads.
If a website has a lot of intrusive ads and ignores notifications from Google for 30 days, the browser will start blocking ads.
Google doesn’t want to kill ads entirely. It makes the vast majority of its revenue through its ad network — or about $95 billion in 2017.
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