When it comes to displaying ads, Google is one of the top companies in the world. According to a report they recently released, however, they are also one of the top companies for removing ads from their own network. In 2017, the company removed more than 3.2 billion different ads due to a variety of different types of violations. This is almost double the number that they blocked in 2016, which was 1.7 billion.
79 million of these ads were removed because they led to sites that were infected with malware. 400,000 were directly to sites specifically made to transmit malware. Another 66 million were so-called ‘trick-to-click’ ads that attempted to get people to click on them even though they weren’t really interested in the ad, and another 48 million were ads that prompted consumers to install unwanted software.
As part of this blocking process, they removed more than 320,000 publishers from their ad program, and blacklisted 90,000 websites as well as 700,000 mobile apps.
Scott Spencer, Google’s director of sustainable ads, commented on this report saying, “That’s more than 100 bad ads per second!”
Keeping their ad network as free from bad ads as possible, and this is obviously a huge problem that they are putting a lot of effort into addressing.
