Chrome’s heavy ads intervention is coming into effect. Chrome developers announced the heavy ads intervention on Maу 14th, and now it’s being gradually rolled out. 

“The core idea of Heavy ads intervention is to combat ads that consume excessive amounts of bandwidth and CPU usage on user’s phones and devices and prevent them from loading in the first place.”

Adunis Chaboukji, Compliance Manager at TwinRed

According to Chrome developers, only 0,3% of ads account for 27% of network data used by ads and 28% of all ad CPU usage, these ads may be poorly optimized, or downright malignant to users. So to improve user’s experience and define “Heavy ads” that will be unloaded, Googles developers came up with the following criteria :

If the ad’s creative uses

• the main thread for more than 60 seconds total;
• the main thread for more than 15 seconds in any 30-second window (50% utilization over 30 seconds);
• more than 4 megabytes of network bandwidth to load resources.

Then it is to be considered “heavy” and will be blocked and not shown.

Most of the possible subject creative-types are hosted within iframes: 

• interstitials;
• iframe banners;
• pre-rolls.

“As previously said, this feature was set to be released in August with Chrome 85, but it is only being rolled out now. Right now not all of Chrome’s users are affected, but eventually, this feature will come as default in all of the browsers. This measure may cause some discomfort for those advertisers who use creatives that are overfilled with the content or poorly optimised and thus can be considered “heavy”.

Adunis Chaboukji, Compliance Manager at TwinRed

With the help of the “Google Non-Compliant Heavy Ads” tag publishers and site owners will be able to opt-out of showing said ads. As for advertisers, your medias can be tested by following instructions by Google. If you have any doubts, you can always reach out to your TwinRed account manager or send us an email to support@twinred.com.