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.

Comments

Me too

[swimboy]

I bet I killed at least that many by installing AdBlock.

And how many bad ads...

[theodp]

...did it deliver? :-)

Did an editor read this?

[wonkey_monkey]

including include ads for counterfeit products

You do know typos make the site look stupid and unprofessional, right? But you just don't care?

Posted by timothy

Never mind.

Re:Did an editor read this?

[Lunix Nutcase]

Timmay!!!!

49%

[wbr1]

Love or hat google, in my experience their ads rarely if ever are spammy, malware laden trash. Meaning they do a fair job of policing tier ad network. If they had a nearly 50% increase in the number of bad ads removed, it stands to reason that the other ad networks may have more (as the spammers know to use them and not Google).
This is why the use of adblockers is exploding. Annoyance is one thing. Outright fraud and malware is another. When maybe 10% or more of ads are dangerous in some way, a person that browses 50 pages in a day, each with multiple ads will be exposed at least once, if not much more often to potential junk.

These aren't just shady overseas viagra and porn sites either, it is coming from mainstream sites. My local news station's website was delivering an ad that targeted nexus users with a scam that replaced their news page.

I am just afraid we will see lot's of good content die with the ad networks.

Ah yes, 2 months of Indian hell for me

[ugen]

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

Re:Ah yes, 2 months of Indian hell for me

[dackroyd]

To me this was yet another proof that Google became too big for what it is, and on an individual level dealing with Google is harder and less pleasant than dealing with a cable company.

I don't think 'too big' is a good description for the fundamental problem. The real problem is that Google's business model has always relied on razor thin margins, and so it only makes a profit if it automates all of it's business processes. This works well for the vast majority of use cases, but when you get an edge case, such as yours their systems just aren't set up to to deal with it.

Rather than increase the complexity of their business processes they have made an explicit decision to just not care about those edge cases, even if it means that people caught by those edge cases are unable to use Google products. With automated processes they can still serve 95% of the people who want to use Google services, at a much reduced cost than if they tried to serve 100% of customers.

I don't think there is a simple solution to this. Google are too dominant in several areas to be replaced by competitors easily. And I can't see a feasible way to make them not have a financial desire to just ignore "edge case" customers. But yes, Google are at least a little bit evil in making the internet much harder to use for people who they can't easily make money from.