Google’s Chrome browser will soon stop showing videos that include certain kinds of ads, and the policy will affect YouTube as well as other websites.
The changes are outlined in a blog post from Google describing “three ad experiences that people find to be particularly disruptive on video content that is less than 8 minutes long”.
They include long, non-skippable pre-roll ads “longer than 31 seconds that appear before a video and that cannot be skipped within the first 5 seconds”; mid-roll ads of any duration that appear in the middle of a video; and image or text ads overlaid on videos that “are in the middle 1/3 of the video player window or cover more than 20 percent of the video content”.
