User blog comment:Brandon Rhea/Making Ads Better: The Basics/@comment-1824272-20170117155514/@comment-20644-20170117204958


 * Brandon, you just told us the two things that matter to advertisers: viewability and relevance. Neither of these things require that an ad autoplay a video.

To an advertiser, auto-play is a higher form of viewability. A visitor might be more inclined to click the sound button to ON when a video auto-plays. Of course, we only want well-performing ones. Directly sold ads are going to be of higher quality. We also do not use auto-sound, so if you are seeing those then that should be reported to us because it is violating our ad policies. But in general, video ads are moving towards ones with better performance, and the performance will also improve as we remove more ad units from the page.


 * When you guys create a design ad, you replace the wiki background on the left and right edges with an ad background. THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE. You can't give us the illusion of customization for our wiki and then take it away from us. This is something that I'd love to see changed in the future with direct ads, because when you start to literally block off certain aspects of customization is when users start to get really angry.

That type of background ad is a very high performing one for us, and to remove it would require us to add more ad clutter to the page. It does mean that the wiki's background sometimes isn't shown, but that's a trade off to having less junky ads on a page. We do have frequency capping, though, so a given user only sees a background takeover a certain amount of times.


 * "Oh, and please, stop accepting ads that literally block the screen. This may be "acceptable" on mobile devices—and speaking of which, I hope we'll get a blog post talking about that too, because there are problems there too—but it's not acceptable on a desktop experience."

Are you referring to ads that expand, or are you saying that you have seen ads where you can't get to the content at all?