Google’s Fight Against Bad AdsOver 500 million ads blocked in 2014
With annual advertising revenues approaching US $60 billion, we all know that Google serves a lot of ads each year.
But along with this huge volume of legitimate advertising, there are a lot of “bad ads” that Google has to deal with. For example, “bad ads” might be ads for counterfeit products, ads that lead to malware sites, ads for phishing, etc.
Last year Google blocked 524 million bad ads. This post and infographic give some further detail into this very interesting part of Google’s business.
The ease and effectiveness of online advertising through Google has been a huge benefit to many, many companies both large and small. But with an ecosystem this big, and potential revenues so large, it is clear that it will also attract a large number of “bad actors” (Google’s term).
Google puts a lot of effort into preventing bad ads in order to keep the Google advertising world working smoothly, keep consumer confidence high, and preventing these bad actors from tainting the reputation of the entire online ad system.
Employing both a dedicated team of analysts as well as specialized automated systems, Google blocks millions of ads, and disqualifies hundreds of thousands of advertisers each year.
Here are some highlights from Google’s annual report on their effort to fight against bad ads – the numbers are amazing:
- Bad Ads:
Google actively blocked over 524 million ads in 2014. This is about 1.4 million per day, or 1,000 blocked ads every minute! - Bad Advertisers:
214,000 advertisers were blocked during 2014 - Counterfeiters:
Products on over 7000 sites were discovered to be counterfeit, so the sites were blocked - Malware:
Google ads have been used as a means to convince internet users to go to malware infected sites. This year Google removed 250,000 such sites from their network. - Weight loss scams:
In conjunction with Yahoo, AOL, and others, over 2.5 million ads related to weight loss or dietary supplements were removed in the past 18 months
Vikaram Gupta, Director of Ads Engineering at Google, the author of the Bad Ad report, concluded: “The security of our users is the foundation of our ecosystem, and we’ll continue to work tirelessly to keep people safe online.”
This is a part of Google’s business we rarely hear about, but we’re glad that they are putting in the effort to keep the online advertising market clean.
