Even Adobe is sick of Flash — the software’s creator has started urging people to stop using it in favor of HTML5 — but the player still persists in web ads across the internet. Fortunately, that may soon be about to end. Google has announced that from June 30th this year, its widely used AdWords and DoubleClick advertizing services will no longer allow uploads of ads built in Flash, forcing users to code their display ads in HTML5 instead. From January 2nd next year, Flash ads won’t run at all on DoubleClick or the Google Display Network.
Google has slowly shifted in favor of HTML5 in recent years, adopting the format as default on YouTube, and making it easier for ad creators to switch their campaigns from Flash to the newer format. Adobe’s vulnerability-riddled player made up only six percent of mobile and web video in 2015, down from 21 percent in 2014, but its regular use in ad campaigns has kept it in use longer than expected. With the internet’s biggest and most important ad networks giving up on the format, we might actually succeed in kicked the player from our browsers in two years, but the software still has a foothold — Google says that Flash video ads aren’t included in the cull “at this time.”
