Even more evidence about the coming demise of ad based revenue model.

Mish discusses Google's coming intention to kill autoplay ads and other crapware in Google Chrome. As Mish indicated, Autoplay ads are just pure crap.  Nobody wants a fucking video or audio track to pop up just for going to a web page.  Not only could it be embarrassing if, for example, you are surfing the web while attending a business Skype call but it also makes the page take way longer to load while opening you up to ad borne viruses.

Once this is widespread in Chrome it will have to be put into Firefox, Edge and MSIE as well or those competitors will risk share loss. This is kind of a big deal IMO.  It is the industry self regulating what happens on their products instead of the free for all that open standards enabled.  It is basically a shot across the bow of the ad providers telling them that they have gone too far and need to rein it in. 

This is the beginning of the end IMO.  WHY??  Why will toned down ads not work?  Well, look at the facts.  We had toned down ads for a long time but people became adept at ignoring them.  This reduced the value of the money spent on ads by advertisers.  It is in response to these user behaviors that we saw ads go from just plain text in a side bar to the use of pop ups that could be X'd to close to animated graphics in a side bar that you could not close and finally to pop up videos with sound that begin as soon as the page is opened.   There is clearly an escalation here.  Each time the ads upped the game, the users worked around it, sometimes with help from plugins, etc.  But now Google is making it a built in feature and so I expect it to not only "just work" but to work very effectively.  As a result, the effectiveness of ad dollars is going to tank and when the advertizers see this they are going to reduce their spend.

It becomes a self reinforcing negative spiral.