Many of us knew this was coming. Google has announced Tuesday that they will finally stop serving Flash formatted display ads.
Advertiser’s will no longer be able to upload new Flash ads in AdWords or DoubleClick as of June 30, 2016. This will only be one step into the abolishment of Flash on Google, as Flash ads won’t be eligible to run on Google’s ad networks when January 2, 2017 rolls around. After that, all display ads are to be built in HTML5.
Not to take a step back from what they said, Google says that video ads built in Flash aren’t going to be affected by these deadlines, and at this point, there isn’t any word on when similar changes will affect video.
This is the final of a number of steps that Google has taken to remove Flash from their systems. Google even began auto-converting Flash ads to HTML5 on mobile devices that don’t support Flash in February of this year. Google began pausing Flash-based ads by default in the Chrome browser in September. YouTube even made their video player HTML5 as a default back in January.
According to Google, the move is going to “enhance the browsing experience for more people on more devices” Naturally, advertisers are being encouraged to migrate their ads to HTML5 ahead of the deadlines.