Google Googly – Aggressive Advertisements Clean-Bowled

The Google Play Store has been facing quite a criticism for last few months. The advertising networks were reaping more and more benefits because of their aggressive advertisements strategies. This however made Big G quite unhappy so it decided to take control of the situation.

Google has always prioritize the user experience over any other factor. The aggressive advertisements, however, were making user experience more and more annoying. The aggressive ads like “Push Notifications”, “Home Screen Icon Ads”, “Action based Full Page Interstitial Ads” and in some cases “Custom Search and Favorites Links” were created on the user’s android phones.

Considering all these advertisements tact’s, Google has introduced change in their terms of policies for all developers. Now based on the new developer’s terms of policies, the developers now need to inform all the users prior about various advertisements and monetization packaged within the android app.

It is mandatory now for user to write all types of apps advertisements and monetization strategies in the description of the application so that user can read it before downloading. Furthermore, now all aggressive advertisements, such as Push Notification Ads, Icon Ads, Full Screen Interstitial Ads need to follow the strict EULA protocol. Now each and every one of these aggressive advertisers need to inform the user about their advertisements before the user starts using the application. The EULA message will come in the form of Splash Screen which will come only once and will be destroyed automatically.

What’s in it for Developer is that now they have to work even harder to get revenue from their free apps. Since the aggressive advertisers like Airpush, Leadbolt and Senddroid are among the top performing advertisers for the free apps, if these advertisers are facing Google wrath, the heat will eventually come to the developers.

Earlier developers used to put 3-4 such aggressive advertisers in their apps and reaped the benefits of their advertisements strategies. With the arrival of EULA message for every advertisement, if user sees 3-4 EULA messages in the beginning of the application, the possibility is that he/she will un-install it at that very moment.

Furthermore, with the new policies, now every push advertisement has a mandatory condition to show the app name along with the advertisement so that user should know which app is showing push notification and in case they don’t want to see those push ads, they can either uninstall that particular app from their phone or can opt-out from the advertisement while keeping the application on their phone.

The introduction of new policies has mainly -ve response from the developer community. Particularly the free app developer who don’t sell their apps are extremely displeased with the introduction of these policies. The reason is simple that they don’t have resources or money to create high end cutting edge android apps and then sell them. Most of the developers in Google Play are simple hard earning normal people who use their coding and designing skills to make some living.

What we are definitely sure of are that introduction of new Google Policy will have a serious impact on the free developers and their revenue. We can only pray that in future Google comes out with something in favor of these poor souls otherwise their revenue and in-turn future in Google Play seems in jeopardy.