As per the new Developer Program Policy, Google bans unexpected, misleading, and annoying ads from its platform.
The Google Play Store has now a massive gallery of apps & games comprising both freemium and premium products pulling millions of users each year to its platform. It’s a great marketplace for the developers to sell their products and get the best shot out of it. As per records, Play Store has nearly 97% of Free Apps & Games whereas only 3% of them are paid content. It is quite interesting to understand how this 97% of products make their market cap.
If you are a developer then you already know the answer, it’s all about monetizing strategy, which includes but is not limited to, In-App Purchases, Advertising, Offer walls, Surveys, etc. However, for most of the developers like us, we all have started by putting ads on our free-to-play games and some of us might have also got banned from the most famous Ad platform, Admob. In the expectation to get millionaires overnight developers tend to storm their Games with ads and find thousands of ways to cheat the policies set by the platform. Ultimately most of them get banned by the platform and it has been seen the same trend ever since. Though developers try their best to put out ads wherever possible, users on the other hand are not left out with any option sometimes as some of these ads are not even skippable. And if we consider the trend now, then it is quite evident that such practices are happening on a larger scale and a few developers are exploiting users with unexpected, misleading, and annoying ads.
In this regard, Google recently made major changes to its Developer Program Policies supporting the users and introducing strict regulations for the developers to practice fair play. The new guidelines ensure that the developers should follow up with “High-Quality Experiences” for the users and players. The platform would also not tolerate any kind of “unexpected ads” shown in “unexpected ways” which is further described by Google in the set of examples. Additionally, Google will no longer allow any full-screen interstitial ads slamming onto the face of the user when taking certain actions. This also includes showing the user a full-screen ad just after clicking a button or else showing the ads before the game starts, at the beginning of the level. Splash screen ads are not allowed in this context. Moreover, full-screen ads which are not closable after 15 secs are not allowed anymore, however, ads that do not interrupt the user experience and their action might still be used. As the rewarded ads are for a specific cause and they are dependent on the user consent in order to show an ad to the user, therefore, such ads are still available for the developers to use in their games. These are mostly incentive oriented and give benefit to the user if they wish to watch an ad, so, as they are approved by the user itself, Google has no strict pans for restricting it as of now.
Check the full Developer Program Policy.
These changes are set to be effective from 30th September 2022 and the developer will be receiving a grace period of 30 days to make any urgent changes required. With these updates, users can expect the platform to be filled with more genuine products and less spammy content.
With Love From VOiD1 Gaming
