Google is helping websites make their ads a little less annoying

Why it matters to you

Your web browsing experience should get a lot better soon, as Google works hard to make online advertising less annoying.

The internet is a tricky business today. Users are growing increasingly tired of obtrusive and disruptive web ads, while publishers still need to generate revenue to pay for their ongoing operations.

While some people don’t want to see any ads at all, many users just want advertising to be manageable and to no longer detract so badly from the browsing experience. That’s where Google’s efforts to make advertising less intrusive come in.

Google is an advertising company itself, of course. The majority of its revenue comes from internet ads, and so it has a vested interest in making sure that users can enjoy the web experience without resorting to ad blocker software that could destroy the online advertising industry. In other words, Google doesn’t want people to block all ads just to get rid of that single annoying one that blasts music unexpectedly and can’t be turned off.

In order to help make online ads more effective by being less obtrusive and obnoxious, Google joined the Coalition for Better Ads. This industry group aims to improve online ads and has created a set of Better Ads Standards intended to guide the industry toward improving ads by providing clear, public, and data-driven guidelines.

As part of its efforts, Google is creating the Ad Experience Report, which will help publishers get a handle on the Better Ads Standards and learn how to apply them to their own sites. Publishers can check out Google’s new best practices guide to get an idea of the right kinds of ads to use.

In addition, Google has a new service, called Funding Choices, that publishers can use to display a customized message to site visitors who are running ad blocker software. The message invites users to enable ads on that particular site — presuming that the standards are being followed — and offer up a paid pass that can remove those sites. The new Google Contributor is the mechanism that sites can use to charge this fee.

Google is making changes to its own Chrome browser to help resolve the situation as well. For example, Chrome already blocks ads that want to pop-up in new tabs, and Chrome will eventually block ads on sites that don’t comply with the Better Ads Standards. That will start in early 2018.

Fixing the ad situation is important for users, publishers, and advertisers alike. The more that Google can do to keep users happy while still serving up ads, the better it is for its business — meaning that this is one Google initiative that we’re sure it won’t abandon anytime soon.