We have recognized a potential issue with a conflict between common ad tech tools and the new Chrome 120 update that might affect monetization. Our tech team is still digging into this and working with partners across the industry to more deeply understand and solve, but we figured sharing our findings with publishers directly might help in alerting them to an issue they might not realize could be happening under the hood of their ad tech engine.

What’s the Issue?

The Chrome 120 update seems to have introduced new security checks that are causing ad creatives incorporating certain code to fail. We have seen repeated evidence of this happening with video ad creatives that incorporate MOAT and a few other monitoring or creative tools for example. 

To be clear, we are not calling out any company, nor certain that all ads using their code are caught in the dragnet, just that we have recognized a couple of repeating patterns. When these are ads played within Chrome 120 for desktop, the ads start playing briefly, then are killed by the browser. We’ve seen this behavior not only in our own video player, but also that of other providers.

What Should You Do?

We have reached out to our contacts at any companies with affected code to try to make sure they are aware of the situation. If you are a publisher playing video ads, or an SSP selling them, consider confirming that you, too, are seeing it, and if so, contacting any companies whose code seems to be getting squashed by Chrome. 

You can do this by opening the Chrome 120 console and watching to see if your ads are getting killed off, then looking at the resulting errors and the domains associated with those errors. These issues tend to be associated with "[Violation] Permissions policy violation" messages. This is not to say that we are certain the issues are always linked to these messages; it is correlation, not necessarily causation.

The two most common messages linked to the behavior are:

  • "[Violation] Permissions policy violation: accelerometer is not allowed in this document."
  • "[Violation] Permissions policy violation: encrypted-media is not allowed in this document."

The affected creatives are not getting played, so the situation is bad for their campaigns, and is also leading to latency and extra QPS as re-auctions get forced (assuming the video player you use is smart enough to recognize the problem and re-auction). So this is bad for publishers, SSPs, and buyers alike.

Finally, the problem does not seem to be 100% restricted to video; we’ve seen instances of this with display as well, though they are much less common.

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