Google is said to be investigating the adoption of an acceptable ads policy as a counter to the growing popularity of ad blockers, according to a report Monday.

Digiday claims the policy would require ads served on its Adwords and Doubleclick networks are not obtrusive or annoying, enabling ad-blocking companies with what it calls “acceptable ad” programs to let them bypass the filters.

Although not specifically mentioning the speed of ads, Google’s policy may also consider slow web page load times from ads as well; both poor quality and slow-loading ads have been blamed for the rise of adblocking.

The news comes on the same day market leading ad blocking company Adblock Plus (Eyeo GmbH) announced at a conference in New York that they now have more than 100 million active installations.

“While user numbers in countries where ad blocking is fairly well-known, like Germany and France, are pretty stable, in countries like the U.S. and U.K. people are really coming on to the benefits of taking back control of their online experience,” a statement from the company read.

Pushback

Advertisers are said to be unimpressed with the proposal, with Digiday saying publishers are facing resistance from advertisers that don’t feel the pressure to change their ads to make them load faster, although “having the backing of a big player, Google, could give publishers sway with those advertiser.”

“Clearly, someone has to grab hold of this situation that has scope,” one publishing executive told the publication.

What is clear, given the continued growth of adblocking, is that something has to be done by both publishers and advertisers that will stem the flow of users who are simply not seeing any ads now at all.

As I wrote in my confession April 29 that after many years as a publisher, startup founder, and employer who relied on advertising to pay bills, I too had started using an ad blocker and I like it, but a policy such as the one I outline below might work:

One thing that could possibly be done is something along the lines of sites committing to reduce the number of ads they show and perhaps embrace a best practice model that is focused on load times for readers; yes, it’s a very long stretch but a best practice policy could be a start to turning the tide against those, sadly like me, who use ad blockers.

I know I would whitelist sites that signed up to a policy such as this, and I’d bet that many others would as well; not all ad blocking users are anti-capitalist anti-all ads (be it some are). Some simply want an improved web browsing experience.

Whether Google can lead this charge, or it needs a whole industry approach, isn’t clear, but credit where it is due: Google recognizes that there is a problem and something needs to be done to address it.

Image credit: Andrew Willard/ YouTube/CC by 2.0