Mobile ads are horrible. They eat up too much data [link] and load slowly, resulting in a growing number of wireless users turning to ad-blockers. In an effort to improve the mobile browsing experience — and, oh yeah, protect its sizable stream of ad revenue — Google is looking to speed up load times for ads. 

Google has already demonstrated through its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) program that it can dramatically improve mobile performance of web pages. Now the Wall Street Journal reports that Google is expected to launch AMP for Ads, an open-source project designed to assist advertisers in building ads that load faster on mobile devices, this week.

The new project entails providing ad creators a set of guidelines and codes that would lend themselves to faster ads.

Accelerating content isn’t anything new for Google, the company already uses AMP to load articles faster on Google News, Google search, an other mobile device components.

While this process has allowed for content to load faster on mobile devices, ad content hasn’t enjoyed the same speediness.

Under current standards, the WSJ reports that mobile users are seeing fewer ads — which are often flashy and contain tracking mechanisms — because they take twice as long to fully load than their counterparts on desktops.

“As mobile has grown, the ad experience has become less than ideal,” Dan Taylor, Google’s managing director of global display, tells the WSJ. “The goal with AMP for Ads is 100% user experience-focused. A healthy and vibrant mobile Web is good for Google and all publishers.”

Still, loading ads faster doesn’t mean consumers will embrace the content. Currently, about 2.5 million Americans are using ad blockers on their smartphones. Use of the mobile adblocking browsers grew by 90% in 2015.

But that’s nothing compared to the use of the blockers in other countries. A recent report from PageFair, a majority of mobile ad-blocking is occurring in just a few countries: China, with 159 million ad-blockers; India (122 million); Indonesia (38 million); and Pakistan (10 million).

Additionally, some European wireless carriers have taken on the issue of mobile ads and the data they suck up by proactively blocking ads from being served on their mobile networks.

Google Looks to Amp Up Mobile Ads [The Wall Street Journal]

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