Spokespeople for Chrome and Google declined to comment on the record. And, they said, it’s unclear whether an ad subject to an “intervention” - but rendered as a grey box on the page - would still count as an impression on Google Ad Manager. They added that while Google has a reporting API that notifies publishers when interventions have taken place, it would be useful to have more granular details as standard about which line items are causing interventions without having to deploy their own internal developers.

The ad operations executive said it’s difficult to determine just by looking at an advertising asset how “heavy” it might be and whether it could be blocked under the new filter - a situation made more difficult when certain campaigns have different renditions to suit multiple devices. “Sometimes I’m secretly quite grateful for moderately tough deadlines for things like this to get things moving, but this is a bit too tight to say the least,” the programmatic manager said.Ī person who oversees ad operations at a separate large publisher said they too would have appreciated more lead time: “We are all for improving the user experience on our site: This one just came up so abruptly we couldn’t get ahead of the solution and warn our advertisers.” Writing on Github last year, a Chrome engineer said the intervention is designed to discourage practices like ads that mine cryptocurrency and ads that “perform expensive operations in javascript, such as decoding video files, or CPU timing attacks,” among other bad user experiences.Ī programmatic manager at a global publishing company said they hadn’t heard anything from Google about the heavy ads intervention update - despite being in touch with a Google account manager just a few days ago. In place of the filtered ad will be a grey square, with the label “ad removed.” Publishers can test how the Heavy Ads Intervention will affect their pages in versions of Chrome 84 and upward by following the instructions on this page.

Announced in May on the Chromium and Google Developers blogs, the new heavy ad intervention feature “unloads” ads that use up more than 4MB of network data or 15 seconds of CPU usage in any 30-second period or 60-seconds of total CPU usage - suggesting the filter will primarily affect video ads.

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