Google’s 2016 Bad Ads Report, shows a huge increase in the bad ads removed in 2016.
It took down 1.7 billion ads last year, more than twice the 780 million it took down in 2015.
The company says the increase was due to changes they made, which included removing payday loan ads, in keeping with their new policy.
The new rules went into effect in July 2016 and since then, they removed 5 million, non-compliant payday loan ads.
Trick-to-click ads, were another major delete category: 112 million of these were taken down in 2016.
80 million ads were taken down for deceiving or shocking users, and 68 million ads were banished for promoting unapproved pharmaceuticals. But those pharma ads were up from 12.5 the year before. What’s in store for 2017?
Fake news went mainstream in the wake of last year’s presidential election campaign in the United States. Google updated its ‘misrepresentative content policy in November and then reviewed 550 sites it suspected, including those impersonating news organisations. Google took action against 340 of the sites and banned almost 200 publishers from the AdSense network.
‘Tabloid cloaking ads, those news or entertainment headlines that have you clicking into weight-loss winners or miracle cures, are another growing reality. Google took down 1300 of these.
“During a single sweep for tabloid cloaking in December 2016, we took down 22 cloakers that were responsible for ads seen more than 20 million times by people online in a single week.” Google said.
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