Google’s Larry Page on ad blockers – ‘The industry needs to do better at producing ads’
Larry Page, the chief executive of Google, has said one of the best ways to tackle ad blocking online is to simply make better ads.
During a Google shareholders meeting, Page said that as an industry, making ads that load faster, are helpful and less intrusive to users, could help tackle the lost revenue from ad block users.
He said: “We've been dealing with ad blocking for a long time. There's been a number of different products to do that. Part of it is the industry needs to do better at producing ads that are less annoying, and that are quicker to load, and all those things. And I think we need to do a better job of that as an industry.
“We've been trying to pioneer that. I think search ads are very good in that sense, and, in fact, a lot of places where ads can be blocked, search ads do not get blocked because they are really useful. So I think that's a really good example of what we're trying to do.”
Page concluded: “But I don't think there's been any major change in that dynamic in the last year or anything like that.”
The use of ad blockers hurts the earning power of web giants such as Google – as a result the search firm is among the companies paying Ad Block Plus to have its ads appear to web users.