Advertising Age interviewed Google Senior VP-Ads and Commerce Sridhar Ramaswamy to discuss the rise of ad blocking, why Google pays AdBlock Plus maker Eyeo to unblock its ads and to what
extent the Google-led Accelerated Mobile Pages project is addressing the biggest issues plaguing publishers. Ramaswamy says for the longest time, ad blocking was a small scale phenomenon, but
that lately, it's become a mainstream phenomenon.
"And of course with Apple making moves to have ad blocking also go to mobile and also our own observations about how the mobile ad experience
has gotten worse for several sites, we think this is actually a great time for the industry to be talking together and figuring out what are better ad standards. The fact of the matter is that when
you want to read a short article on something and you click on a link, you're not expecting to have an ad that completely covers the screen [and] have to hunt around for the X." He says Google is
working on the problem and "figuring out what are standards we can all agree with in terms of this better ads experience. Aspects include latency, how many requests are fired and what kind of
experiences are OK and not OK and so on."
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