Google blocks 99 million covid related ads
Google blocked or removed approximately 3.1 billion ads for violating the company’s policies and restricted an additional 6.4 billion ads during 2020. The company blocked over 99 million Covid-related ads from serving throughout the year, including those for miracle cures, N95 masks due to supply shortages, and most recently, fake vaccine doses, the company said in its annual report on advertising safety.
”Often when we experience a major event like the pandemic, bad actors look for ways to take advantage of people online”, Scott Spencer, Vice President, wrote in a blog post.
”We saw an uptick in opportunistic advertising and fraudulent behavior from actors looking to mislead users last year. Increasingly, we’ve seen them use cloaking to hide from our detection, promote non-existent virtual businesses or run ads for phone-based scams to either hide from detection or lure unsuspecting consumers off our platforms with an aim to defraud them.”
”We also continued to invest in our automated detection technology to effectively scan the web for publisher policy compliance at scale. Due to this investment, along with several new policies, we vastly increased our enforcement and removed ads from 1.3 billion publisher pages in 2020, up from 21 million in 2019.”
”We also stopped ads from serving on over 1.6 million publisher sites with pervasive or egregious violations.”
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