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Google Says It Killed 780 Million 'Bad Ads' In 2015 (cio.com)
itwbennett writes: According to a new Google report, the search giant disabled more than 780 million "bad ads," including include ads for counterfeit products, misleading or unapproved pharmaceuticals, weight loss scams, phishing ploys, unwanted software and "trick-to-click" cons, globally last year. This marks a 49 percent increase over 2014. For perspective, it would take an individual nearly 25 years to look at the 780 million ads Google removed last year for just one second each, according to Google. If the trend continues, Google's team of more than 1,000 staffers dedicated to killing spam will be even busier in 2016, and they could disable more than a billion junky ads.
I tried Firefox recently, after many years of using Chrome, and I was very surprised when Firefox started showing me "sponsored" tiles on the new tab page!
The problem with this is two-fold:
1) Firefox built the ads right into the browser.
2) Firefox labeled them as "sponsored" instead of being honest and labeling them what they are: advertisements.
I hear that they've come to their senses and are going to remove these ads, but the damage has still been done.
How the hell can I trust Mozilla and Firefox after this debacle?
How the hell could they have been so stupid as to build ads right into Firefox, especially when so many Firefox users use ad blocking extensions?!
I know they need revenue, but doing this was totally unacceptable, and that fact should have been obvious from the start.
I think that these ads built right into Firefox have completely ruined Firefox's reputation.
Yep, I noticed that. I am running an ad for my (very small, independent) software product. It's essentially a hobby - sales are barely break-even with related hosting, and AdWords bring about half. I don't have much time to deal with AdWords so ads are mostly fixed. Occasionally (about once a year) I shuffle a few words in the text. Sometime early this year I did that again - and suddenly my ads were blocked "due to policy violation". Automated email requires you to review policy and edit ads for compliance - but there is no policy as such (at least nothing is clearly explained in writing). So I did my best guessing what they may want, edited ads again and resubmitted - same result. I re-edited the ads to original text, resubmitted - and at that point my ads were blocked again and then my entire AdWords account was blocked for "repeated violations"
Through that time I attempted to contact AdWords support through online form (they don't expose direct email). I received several pointless replies - none of which directly answered my questions. Once account was blocked - I started calling. Most calls end up in the Indian call center, where reps seem to have neither desire nor ability to help, nor do they know what the actual rules are. I've been given several (perhaps 6?) different versions of what needs to be changed in the ad, on the web site and in the product itself. Examples include - "put EULA directly on the download page", "provide product removal instructions on the download page" (mind you, product removal instructions are - "drag application into the trash folder", quite literally). My favorite was a demand to "provide direct email for users to email my support on the download page", this is from AdWords that go to great lengths to hide their own email and allow only un-trackable contact through the web site. For comparison, I run a proper support ticket system - but there was no convincing them.
As far as I could tell, Indian associates had no authority to deal with issues whatsoever and themselves had to contact a 3rd party (with unknown degree of authority) for answers or clarifications. Even when I made required changes, and resubmitted account for review (as they suggested) - either nothing happened at all or an automated message would come a few days later restating account and/or ad blocking for "policy violations". The cycle of response was running at 1 week per question.
In parallel, to provide at least some visibility, I had to put ads on Bing. That's a whole another story, but suffice it to say - Bing payment vs. click rates did not make sense and I had to stop in about a month.
The final demand was to put the name of actual software package into the ad. Back 8 years ago when I started, I picked a fairly long name for a product - it seemed fun at the time. Putting that name into character-limited ad would leave no space to say anything useful about the software. I suggested that software name could be placed in the URL (which normally references company name, they are similar but not the same). Customer reps. stated that this is not going to help - the name must be in the text. Nevertheless, I decided to try. I registered a new domain that matched software name and resubmitted the ad. As soon as I did - ad was approved and remains so.
I suspect that through the entire process there was no connection at all between the (likely automated) review of ads and customer service. Ads marked as "bad" are probably left in that state forever, regardless of advertisers actions. By the time I changed the url either the giant push to "remove bad ads" was over or something's changed in automated rating, so the "new" ad passed. Curiously, ads for competing products (same industry, same type of software) ran unimpeded throughout the entire period, even though they do not comply with any of the requirements that were given to me. Perhaps they were smart enough to make no changes to ads during that time :)
In conclusion - I am sure a V-level manager at Google reported