Non-ad content being marked as "Ad"

[rand0me]

Hey guys, it looks like the Ad Tagging mechanism has a flaw that makes our users suffer from blocking non-ad content (web games) by Heavy Ad Intervention:

https://www.arkadium.com/games/word-wipe

Indeed, game iframe has ima3.js in its creation call-stack - but this happens because we run pre-roll video ad prior to render it. We rely on ima3.js events - such as skip, complete, error to understand when the video ad has finished. And unfortunately, most of our games are more than 4MB, this is why we have this issue happening very often.

Could you please take a look if this is something that could be fixed here? Would we be able to add an exclusion (though we have >200 sites, such as games.dailymail.co.uk with our games and same rendering method).

I'd be very thankful for any information or advice how to avoid getting a game container tagged as "Ad" on our websites.

Thank you!

[jkarlin]

Right, ima3.js in the stack of the game iframe creation would cause Chrome to think that your game iframe is an ad frame. Can you create the game iframe independently and hide it until after the ad completes?

[rand0me]

Hi Josh, sorry for the delay here. Thank you for the reply and the advice.
We tried to do so, but it turns out that:

1. If we create an iframe with the correct src then game starts loading and playing music in background (and causing network load)
2. If we create an iframe without src and try to set it after ad has been shown, chromium-ads-detection still marks it as ad

[johnivdel]

Thanks @rand0me for the update. Looking at the site now, it looks like the frame is not being tagged as an ad for me. Does the repro link above still work for you?

My expectation is that (2) should work, navigating the frame with ad script in the stack shouldn't re-tag it. Is there any other ad script in the stack when you try and create the iframe before the video ad?

You could also try setting an initial src on the frame like: "...arkadiumhosted.com/empty_frame.html" and see if that causes a difference.