Over the past few months, new standards for ads have been released by both BetterAds.org and the IAB. We think that these are in response to the proliferation of more and more ad blockers; the ad industry has started taking responsibility for the quality of online ads.
And while we felt that this is great news for consumers, we also realized that it was time to update our own certification requirements for apps that inject or block ads. So we spent the past few months working with our customers, some of the larger ad injector vendors, compliance partners, various security and platform companies, and CleanApps.org.
This work drove significant changes: not only did we adjust the requirements, but some of the requirements were promoted to Deceptor-level. Starting in October, we'll be reviewing and calling out bad ad injectors and blockers and adding them to our active Deceptor list.
You can find a summary of the changes in the following ad injector requirement updates document. Please feel free to use this to understand the context behind the changes. Also, all the changes are live in our online requirements checklist.