Google Experimenting With New Ad Formats For Virtual Reality

For the most part, a lot of Google’s services and products are free to use which probably explains how they’ve managed to amass so many customers over the years. Granted there are some paid Google services, but unless you’re an enterprise user or a power user, most of the time you can get away with using Google’s free options.

Of course the saying “there’s no such thing as a free lunch” rings pretty true as Google makes money through ads, and it seems that if you’re hoping that maybe virtual reality (VR) will be ad-free, sorry to say but that doesn’t look like it as Google has announced at the company is experimenting with new ad formats designed for VR over at their Area 120 incubator.

One of the examples they’ve come up with comes in the form of a cube that sits at the bottom of an app, and clicking on it or gazing on it for a few seconds will cause it to spring up and expand. “Developers and users have told us they want to avoid disruptive, hard-to-implement ad experiences in VR. So our first idea for a potential format presents a cube to users, with the option to engage with it and then see a video ad. By tapping on the cube or gazing at it for a few seconds, the cube opens a video player where the user can watch, and then easily close, the video.”

This is presumably just one of the ideas Google is experimenting with now, and to be fair we guess it isn’t a bad one as it isn’t particularly disruptive, and users have the choice of interacting with it. Whether or not this is something that gets implemented remains to be seen, but what do you guys think?

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: daydream, Google, Virtual Reality (VR)