Emma Okonji
In order to sanitise the online advertising ecosystem, and in line with its online advertising policies, Google said it pulled down 3.2 billion ads globally from various websites that operated within the global online ecosystem that is monitored and managed by Google.
Although the global exercise is carried out annually by Google, the company said the number of bad ads kept rising each year.
Head, Global Product Policy, Google Trust and Safety, in charge of Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), Jessica Stansfield, who made the revelation through a teleconference broadcast to all the EMEA regions, said the 3.2 billion bad ads that were pulled down as at 2017, were more than the 1.7 billion ads pulled down in 2016, which was equally more that 700 million bad ads that were pulled down in 2015.
According to her, the statistics on bad ads, showed that more than 100 bad ads were pulled down every second, an indication that some advertisers deliberately put up bad ads to disrupt the entire ecosystem for their personal gains, in spite of the policies that are put in place and are renewed yearly, to address the proliferation of bad ads in the entire ecosystem that is made up of Ad Networks from Google, Advertisers, Publishers, and End users.
She said Google would not relent in its efforts to get rid of ads that are inimical to end users, advertisers and publishers, which are capable of diverting funds and genuine attention online.
She classified bad ads to include Scraping, Tabloid Cloaking, Malicious Activities, Malware and Trick to Click.
Furthermore, she explained that in 2017 alone, Google blocked 12,000 websites, up from the 10,000 websites it blocked in 2016 for Scraping, which has to do with duplicating and copying content from other sites to publish in another site.
For Tabloid Cloaking, which has to do with making false pretense about news stories, Google said it pulled down 7,000 AdWords account, up from 1,400 in 2016.
In the case of Malicious Activities violation, which has to do with compelling end users to click on a particular ad before allowing the end user to navigate on the site, Google said it pulled down 130 million of such ads in 2017, for abuse of the network and for circumventing ad review processes.
For Malware, Google said it blocked 79 million ads on its network, for automatically sending people to malware-laden sites and equally pulled down 400,000 of the malware sites.
Similarly, Trick to Click, which has to do with deceiving people to click on a particular news site that will automatically route the person to a site that the person did not intend to visit, most often, phonographic sites, Google said it blocked 66 million of such sites and 48 million ads that were attempting to get users to instal unwanted software.
Speaking on how Google removed the economic incentives for sites to create and spread deceptive content online, Stansfield said in 2017 alone, Google removed 320,000 bad publishers from its ad network and blocked nearly 90,000 websites and 700,000 mobile apps for policy violations.
“We introduced new technology called Page-Level Enforcement that allows us to remove Google ads from over two million online links every month. Last year, we added 28 new advertiser policies to combat new threats and improve the ads experience online,” Stansfield said.
This year, Google is adding several new policies that will address ads in unregulated or speculative financial products like cryptocurrency and foreign exchange markets, Stansfield said, further adding that Google uses AdSense and AdWords to dictate bad ads.
