In 2017, Google removed 3.2 billion ads, 700k mobile apps
According to Google's latest annual "bad ads" report, the company's ads team removed 3.2 billion "bad ads" in 2017. Notably, this is an increase of 88 percent from 2016, when Google removed 1.7 billion "bad ads." In other words, Google killed roughly 100 "bad ads" per second for the entire year along with blocking and blacklisting several thousand publishers and mobile apps. Here's more.
Bad Ads, Explained
Google explains "bad ads" as any online advertising on its platform that violates the company's advertising policies, including like ad fraud, malware and phishing scams. This includes everything - from a single accident to a coordinated attack by scammers, trying to make money.
Here's how Google is trying to clean the internet
Apart from killing 3.2 billion "bad ads", Google also blocked 7,00,000 mobile apps; 3,20,000 publishers along with blacklisting 90,000 websites from its ad network - all for violating Google's policies around offensive, misleading and inappropriate content. Introduced last year, Google's page-level enforcement to evaluate content on specific pages of a website, has helped the company to block over 2 million pages every month.
Crackdown on clickbait, fake news and malware attacks
Google suspended around 7,000 AdWords accounts for "tabloid cloaking" (presenting and faking websites as news websites). This number has significantly grown in 2017 as compared to only 1,400 sites that were removed last year. Google also killed 130 million ads for malicious activity abuses while blocking 66 million "trick to click" ads and 48 million ads that tricked users to install unwanted software.
Google bans cryptocurrency and ICO ads as well
Starting June this year, Google will ban online ads promoting cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings. The policy change decision, which comes with its annual report on "bad ads", is seen as a broader crackdown on the promotions and marketing of a 'new breed of high-risk financial products.' Google's decision follows Facebook's similar stance when the social networking site banned ads for cryptocurrencies this January.
Google's Ad dollars grew despite crackdown on 3.2 billions ads
Google's crackdown on malicious ads or its latest policies to ban cryptocurrency ads, are unlikely to impact the company's sales. Google blocked 3.2 billion ads in 2017 and yet generated $95.4 billion in ad revenue - up 20 percent from 2016.
