Google said to be planning a built-in ad blocker for Chrome

Google is planning to add an ad blocker to Chrome, its web browser, and to possibly turn it on by default for all users. That seems counterintuitive for a company that makes the majority of its revenue (read: all the monies) from advertising, but it could actually be a way to beat blockers by becoming one itself, per a new Wall Street Journal report that first reported the news.

If Google offers its own ad blocker in Chrome, targeting specific types of ads that users find particularly annoying, like pop-overs and autoplaying audio and video, those users might never seek out a third-party ad-blocking extension, the logic goes. The WSJ reports that Google doesn’t love the deals it often has to make with third-party blockers like Adblock Plus, which require payment of fees in some cases to whitelist ads by companies like Google who are willing to pay for the privilege of working around their filters.

Chrome’s widespread uptake by internet users means the browser has almost half of the market when it comes to navigating the web, so putting an ad blocker natively within Chrome and turning it on by default would basically stop cold the growth of third-party options: Users won’t actively seek out a way to block ads during their web-browsing sessions if the ads are already blocked to begin with.

It’s a plan that’s sort of akin to operating for years with very thin margins or at a loss to block out the competition, almost the way Amazon approached e-commerce. Google wouldn’t be aiming to eliminate advertising altogether, but a side-benefit for consumers might be the institution of more user-friendly acceptability standards for ads — if you turn off your ad blocker for a second, you’ll find it’s gotten pretty bad out there.

Of course, the plan offers plenty of potential pitfalls. As an advertiser itself, Google exercising stronger controls over ads will definitely draw criticism from industry peers, and possibly also from antitrust watchdog organizations. The WSJ says this isn’t yet a done deal, but if it does come, it might be announced sometime within the next few weeks (maybe at I/O in mid-May?), so we shouldn’t have to wait long to find out how much this rocks the online advertising industry boat.

Via

Comments

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document? That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the document

Clip & Convert Your Video Faster With Quicktime X & The New Handbrake 64-bit [Mac]

Recently a friend of mine asked for my help to find a video of a good presentation to be shown to one of his classes. He also requested for it to be iPod friendly as he would also distribute the video to his students. Three things came to my mind: Steve Jobs, Quicktime and Handbrake . Mr. Jobs is well known for his great presentations which are often used as references. I have several Apple Keynotes videos. For my friend, I decided to choose the one that introduced MacBook Air – the one that never fails to deliver the wow effect to the non-techie audience. It’s a part of January 2008 Macworld Keynote. First step: The Cutting To get only a specific part of the Keynote, I clipped the 1+ hour video into about 20 minutes using Quicktime X (which comes with Snow Leopard). I opened the movie using Quicktime X and chose Trim from the Edit menu ( Command + T ). Then I chose the start and end of my clip by moving both edges of the trimming bar to the desired position. To increase th

Ex-Skypers Launch Virtual Whiteboard Deekit

Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a

Kiran Upadhyay

Search This Blog