This is how you can block ads in Chrome on your Android

Google has become an integral stop of the daily grind, we use their search engine when we need to find something out and take advantage of the countless tools made available by the tech giant. The weird thing is that most of these services don’t charge a dime. And if we haven’t been paying them for everything that they provide for us, how did they become what they are today?

The Answer is Ads. About 67-68% of Google’s annual revenue was made up by ads till 2016, with the inclusion of the advertising network, this has gone up to 90%.

So, when Google made an announcement in April 2017 about their plan to add an inbuilt ad blocker to their browser, this was a move that surprised a lot of people.

The ad-blocker became available on the 15th of February, the blocker will not remove every ad on the site, only the ones that do not meet the Better Ads Standard. This was set up by the Coalition for Better Ads.

Twelve types of ads fall under the category of intrusive and fail to meet the Better Ads Standard. Pop-up ads, auto-play videos and full-screen ads fall under this category.

If you do your browsing on Android and have grown tired of ads hounding you all the time, all you need to do is the following:

1) Access the settings of Google Chrome by tapping on the three-dot menu available on the home screen.

2) After this has been done, select the “Site Settings” and then choose “Ads.”

3) There will be a toggle available here which can be disabled if you do not wish to see ads.

As it was mentioned before, this function blocks the sites that have failed to fulfill the Better Ads Standards. After this announcement was made, about 42% of sites that did not meet the standard before have updated their use of advertisements to do so as of February 12, Google expects more websites to start conforming to the standards soon. Google communicates with the sites with ads which violate standards set by them through its Ad Experience Report tool.

If they do not meet the standards, the ads on the websites can be blocked by Google, even if they happened to be owned or served by Google. All the ads from that particular site will be blocked for a period of 30 days. After this period, if the sites wish to use their ads again, they will need to submit for a manual review.

People usually tend to use ad-blockers which blanket blocks all ads if they become plagued by irrelevant content, the ad-blocker is an attempt by Google to ensure that the relevant ads still reach the user and continue to provide them with revenue.