Google Play attempted to stop annoying ads on September 30th, 2022. Did it affect the market?

What’s new

On September 30th, 2022, Google Play implemented changes to its ads policy. It was decided and announced back in July 2022: ads became unbearably annoying and they had to be stopped.

Any casual mobile gamer can vividly remember their rage while staring helplessly at the screen with suffering fish or damsels in distress. Those are the 15 seconds of your life you are not getting back.

In September, things changed to get better for the users. As part of the Coalition for better ads; the policy changed to apply the following practices:

• Ads of any format showing up unexpectedly and occupying full screen. Including ads that appear before the app’s loading screen or at the beginning of a new level/chapter
• Ads of any format you can’t close after 15 seconds. Except for opt-in full-screen interstitials that do not interrupt the user's gaming experience - they may show for more than 15 seconds.

This change might be beneficial for everyone. For example, the mobile gaming industry is huge, but most games are free-to-play and monetize on in-game advertising. That makes the creators vulnerable to ‘bad ads’ that annoy players and can lead to users deleting the game altogether. The policy adjustments lower that risk.

Bigger picture

The Reddit threads on how ads are annoying are getting thousands of upvotes, Quora doesn’t stay behind. Studies have shown that 3 out of 4 respondents avoid advertising and 74% will even use more than one way to do so. No, not all of them have turned to paid streaming – the vast majority just use ad blockers.

So, more and more consumers are asking one naive yet valid question: “why are ads so annoying?” The apparent “bad boys” of irrelevant ads are Snapchat and YouTube.

Ads did not become annoying overnight: various research dedicated to how annoying ads are were conducted and published in the past twenty years. Before that, there were ratings of the worst TV ads.

Nowadays, targeting is supposed to solve the issue of annoying ads. After all, irrelevance is a huge factor in consumer (dis)satisfaction. But how good can one actually be in reaching just the right audience?

Revealbot allows you to use identifiers in your customer list to create a custom audience. Upload your list from Google Sheets and Revealbot will match it to customers' Facebook profiles. With targeting this precise, your ads will be shown only to customers who will find them helpful and not annoying at all.