Google recently announced that Chrome will start blocking resource-heavy ads.

As shared by Marshall Vale, Product Manager, Chrome on this Chromium Blog, Google discovered that a fraction of a percent of ads consume a disproportionate share of device resources, such as battery and network data, without the user knowing about it. These ads (such as those that mine cryptocurrency, are poorly programmed, or are not optimized for network usage) can drain battery life, saturate already strained networks, and cost money.

The thresholds (4MB of network data, 15 seconds of CPU usage in any 30-second period, 60 seconds of total CPU usage) represent just 0.3% of ads, Google said. And yet they account for 26% of network data used by ads and 28% of all ad CPU usage. Google’s chart below shows the overall percentage of heavy and non-heavy ads and the total resource usage of each.

Chrome will limit the resources a display ad can use before the user interacts with the ad. When an ad reaches one of the thresholds, the ad’s frame will navigate to an error page that simply says “Ad removed.”

Read more here:

• https://blog.chromium.org/2020/05/resource-heavy-ads-in-chrome.html
• https://venturebeat.com/2020/05/14/chrome-will-start-blocking-resource-heavy-ads-in-august/