Google Pulls Down 3.2b Violating Adverts, Pays Publishers $12.6 Billion

(FILES) This file photo taken on September 1, 2015 shows the Google logo at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California. Google painted a bleak picture of cybersecurity trends March 20, 2017, saying the number of websites hacked rose 32 percent last year, with little relief in sight.”We don’t expect this trend to slow down. As hackers get more aggressive and more sites become outdated, hackers will continue to capitalize by infecting more sites,” Google said in a post on its webmaster blog. JUSTIN SULLIVAN / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / AFP

Search giant, Google pulled down 3.2 billion adverts that violated its advertising and publishers policies in 2017, in Nigeria and other part of the world. The firm said it paid publishers $12.6 billion in the year under review.

According to Google, that was more than 100 bad adverts per second! By this move, the technology company said it was able to block the majority of bad adverts experiences, like malvertising and phishing scams, before the scams impacted people. Google said it took specific actions against violating adverts involved in scraping; tabloid cloaking; malicious activity; malware and trick to click formats.

The United States of America’s technology company said it blocked 79 million adverts on its network for attempting to send people to malware-laden sites, and removed 400,000 of these unsafe sites last year. It equally removed 66 million “trick-to-click” adverts as well as 48 million adverts that were attempting to get users to install unwanted software.

Speaking to selected journalists via Video Conferencing on Monday, Monetized Products, Google Trust and Safety, EMEA, Jessica Stansfield, said digital advertising plays an important role in making the web what it is today — a forum where anyone with a good idea and good content can reach an audience and make a living. In order for this ads-supported, free web to work for everyone, it needs to be a safe and effective place to learn, create and advertise.

As such, Stansfield said yearly the firm report on the actions it took to keep the ecosystem safe for people, publishers and advertisers. Over the past year, we used a combination of policies, technology and people to remove more bad actors from our ad ecosystem than ever before, and at a faster rate.

According to her, last year, Google removed 320,000 publishers from its ad network for violating the publisher policies, and blocked nearly 90,000 websites and 700,000 mobile apps.She said the technology firm also introduced new technology that allows it to remove Google ads from more than two million URLs each month, adding: “Page-level enforcement technology allows us to better protect our advertisers by removing more ads from more sites while also minimizing the impact on legitimate publishers.”

According to her, this new technology has been critical in helping to scale enforcement for policies that prohibit monetization of inappropriate and controversial content. “After expanding our policy against dangerous and derogatory content in April 2017 to cover additional forms of discrimination and intolerance, we removed Google ads from 8,700 pages that violated the expanded policy,” she stated.

Stansfield revealed that many website owners used the firm’s advertising platforms, like AdSense, to run Google ads on their sites and content and make money.She said Google paid $12.6 billion back to the publishing partners in its ad network last year. “But in order to make money from Google ads, you have to play by rules — that means respecting the user experience more than the ads.”

Stansfield said in 2018, Google will be adding several new policies that will address adverts in unregulated, overly complex, or speculative financial products like binary options, cryptocurrency, foreign exchange markets and contracts for difference (or CFDs), adding: “we have already updated our gambling policies to address new methods of gambling with items that have real-world value, such as skins gambling.