Google is expanding its Funding Choices program to 31 new countries with the goal of providing more publishers with the ability to better monetize their websites, the company said Monday. The initiative itself goes hand-in-hand with the firm’s ad blocker for Chrome, the world’s most popular Internet browser that recently started blocking some particularly aggressive advertising by default in order to allow for a more seamless browsing experience and discourage users from resorting to more comprehensive solutions meant to eliminate promotional content. Websites participating in Funding Choices are able to leverage Google’s tools to display several types of messages to visitors using ad blockers, all of which are meant to inform them of the necessity of displaying ads in the context of monetizing their content in a manner that allows them to pay their contributors and stay in business.
Google remains adamant that the only major reason consumers opt to block all ads is because they previously encountered bad browsing experiences due to a small number of particularly aggressive marketing techniques that Chrome’s ad blocker is now automatically removing. Due to that state of affairs, the company insists neither Funding Choices nor the ad blocking service integrated into its Internet browser are money-driven features, at least not in the sense that they’ve been debuted with the goal of increasing its own revenue. Instead, both are meant to provide publishers with more monetization opportunities and allow them to be more transparent when communicating their ad-based business models to their readers.
The Funding Choices program prompted 4.5 million users to remove their ad blockers and created 90 million more paying pageviews over the course of the last month alone, Google says. On average, some 16-percent of viewers who encounter a message explaining the need of the site they’re visiting to run ads opts to remove or disable their ad blocker for that particular domain, though it’s presently unclear how many Funding Choices partners are fully leveraging the platform, i.e. preventing individuals with ad blockers from accessing their content entirely.