Games without ads

What “no ads” means here

Most free browser games are free because something is being sold around them. Usually that is a banner. Often it is a pre-roll video you cannot skip, in front of a game about stacking blocks. We do not think that is a fair trade for a shuffle button, so we check.

How we check

Each game is loaded in a real Chrome instance and every network request it makes is recorded. Any request to a known ad network — Google IMA, DoubleClick, AdSense, Prebid, Amazon, Criteo and around fifteen others — disqualifies it. Games served from ad-carrying distribution networks are blocked before they are ever imported.

This has to be done in a real browser: ad code is injected at runtime, so fetching the HTML shows you nothing. It also has to be done in a browser that looks real — headless Chrome is served no ads at all, which made our first sweep useless until we found it.

What we removed

Ninety-eight games came out of the catalogue in one pass for serving ads inside the frame. We wrote up the full measurement — two-thirds of the games we tested were running ads.

The honest caveat

These are other people’s games on other people’s servers. A publisher can add advertising at any time without telling us. We re-screen regularly and remove anything that changes, but the guarantee we can make is “checked, recently, in a real browser” — not “checked forever”. If you hit an ad in one of these, tell us and it goes.