Google on Tuesday announced that it has started compressing Google Display Ads, “whenever possible”. The ads will get compressed up to 40%; to get better page load times and increase battery life efficiency.
This is achieved using a new compression algorithm ‘Brotli’ introduced by Google 2 years back. The experiments have seen data savings of 15% in aggregate over standard gzip compression, and in some instances, a savings of over 40%, resulting into faster page loads and less battery consumption.
Not all display ads will get compressed going forward, as Google will be utilizing Brotli whenever possible.
Michael Burns, Software Engineer, Publisher Tagging & Ads Latency Team, Google, said that, ”this will reduce the amount of data sent to end users by tens of thousands of gigabytes every day.”
[pullquote align=”normal”]“Our goal is to help publishers monetize their content and build sustainable businesses through advertising products that allow sites to load as fast as possible to minimize impact to user experience.” [/pullquote]
Google hopes that results like this will encourage wider adoption and will advance web standards such as Brotli compression.
Brotli is used in the top web browsers today, including Chrome, Microsoft’s new Edge browser featured in Windows 10. Apple’s Safari on iOS and macOS are yet to adopt Google’s compression algorithm.
