Google Chrome Flash Killer – Why you should never build a Flash banner again

Ding dong Flash is dead. One of the web’s most loved / hated technologies is finally about to be killed off by Google via an update to its Chrome browser. But why should you care? Tom Sadler explains why advertisers and agencies really should…

Loved by designers and hated buy SEO’ers Adobe Flash was originally developed as a drawing application for pen computers in 1995 by Jonathon Gay who was working for FutureSplash. In 1996 Macromedia acquired FutureSplash and rebranded FutureSplash Animator as Macromedia Flash 1.0.

By the early 2000’s Flash reached its peak and was used by companies such as Nike, HP, GE, HBO and Disney to launch sites and products.

The beginning of the end was Adobe’s fall out with Apple in 2010. Steve Jobs published an open letter called “Thoughts on Flash” in which he criticised the technology’s poor performance on mobile devices, energy sapping nature and overall lack of security. Apple decided not to support Flash on any of its mobile devices. The popularity explosion of the iPhone led to many companies redesigning their sites on mobile friendly platforms.

Fast forward to August 2015 and Google has announced that updated versions of its Google Chrome browser will automatically pause Flash banners that are served by a third party. This is an important stipulation because Google advertisers using the Google Display Network will automatically have their banners converted to HTML 5.

I changed my Chrome browser setting over to the new default setting to see what this new advertising world would look like.

At top we can see that the browser has only paused the side banner and not the top banner. The top banner is not paused and that is because it is part of the Google Display Network which automatically converts Flash adverts to HTML 5. The paused banner now has a play button that needs to be pressed in order to view the animation. I think this might actually encourage engagement with the banner adverts as the content now appears more “native”.

In the examples (left) from News and NineMSN we can see that Chrome has paused all of Audi’s and Jetstar’s banners on their homepage. Considering the huge CPM’s an advertiser such as Audi will have spent to appear here we can begin to see the magnitude of the problem.

Would you be happy as an advertiser if you had spent thousands of dollars on Flash banners and then thousands more on a premium placement only for your advert to be paused?

This change is the final nail in the coffin for Flash, your design agency should be building all online banners in HTML 5 to ensure they are compatible with the latest version of Chrome. Chrome accounts for about 50% of the browser market in Australia. The cost of replacing large numbers of Flash banners is going to be huge.

Tom Sadler is Sales and Marketing Director for www.indagodigital.com.au. They are a digital agency that focus on new client acquisition from SEO, SEM, Display and Social media.