Last week, Eyeo, parent company of Adblock Plus, announced new mobile-specific criteria developed by the independent Acceptable Ads Committee over the last several months. To create the new criteria, the committee commissioned a study and reviewed the results. The committee also surveyed 2,000 ad-blocking users to find out what they find the most disruptive about mobile ads. The new criteria address ad placement, size and animation. Eyeo said it will work closely with its partners to enforce the new mobile-specific ad criteria.

“The Acceptable Ads Committee has done an outstanding job of identifying the need for mobile-specific criteria, and commissioning a large study to collect data among ad-blocking users,” said Job Plas Eyeo’s director of industry relations in a news release. “The findings will be put into practice in the next major update to the Acceptable Ads criteria, which will benefit millions of mobile users worldwide.”

The new criteria include the following:

Placement:

• Static ads like 6×1 banners and 1×1 tiles without animation can be placed anywhere on a mobile page.
• Small ads (6×1 and smaller) can be placed as a sticky ad at the bottom of the mobile screen. No other ad formats are allowed to stick
• Large ads such as native tile ads are only allowed to be placed under primary page content.

Size:

• Ads on a scrollable portion of a webpage, before or inside the page’s primary content, may not take up more than 50 percent of the visible portion of the webpage.
• Ads implemented as a sticky ad can be a maximum of 75px or 15 percent of the screen height. They must include a close button or an easily-identifiable mechanism for closing the ad.
• Ads below the primary content may not exceed the height of 100 percent of the screen height (i.e., not longer than one full scroll).

Animations:

• Animations are permitted for 6×1 ads when placed as sticky ads at the bottom of the screen.
• Animations must comply with LEAN standards, as suggested by IAB.

What’s next? According to a blog post, the committee begin the work of implementing the criteria into the acceptable ads standards. They next meet on October 5.

These changes are part of the Acceptable Ads initiative which tries to ensure that “acceptable ads“…

• Are not annoying
• Do not disrupt or distort page content we’re trying to read
• Are transparent about the fact that they’re an ad
• Are effective without “shouting” at us
• Are appropriate for the site we are visiting

“We developed the original criteria with our users, refined them based upon eyetracking research and surveys and are giving them to an independent committee, which will oversee all future improvements to them,” says the Acceptable Ads website.

The Acceptable Ads Committee is an independent, non-profit committee comprised of 11 stakeholders who represent three different audience segments: User Advocates Coalition (digital rights organization, ad-block user), For Profit Coalition (advertiser, advertising agency, ad-tech company, publisher / content creator) and the Expert Coalition (user agent, creative agent, researcher / academia).

The committee describes its goal as creating new and exceptional ad standards that improve the user experience for ad-blocking users while delivering value to content publishers and digital advertisers.

Insider Take:

In theory, we support what the committee, Eyeo and Adblock Plus are trying to accomplish – to provide a better online experience for users while still providing value to advertisers – but the Acceptable Ads Initiative is too new to know if the group is achieving its stated goals and if this is really bridging the gap between end users and advertisers and publishers.