Google Takes Down 2.3 Billion Ads, Almost 60 Million Phishing Scams

Google’s bad ads report for 2018 is out, and according to Director of Sustainable Ads Scott Spencer, 2.3 billion non-compliant ads were taken down for violating policies, almost 1 billion fewer than the 3.2 billion ads detected in 2017. Many represented malvertising and phishing scams for tech support, bail bonds, garage doors and ticket resellers, with phishing scams totaling 58.8 million.

To improve its lucrative ad business and put an end to the scams, malware and abusive content that have plaguing the company, Google’s team blocked bad ads on 1.5 million applications and 28 million pages. The credit for this achievement goes to the company’s newly introduced machine learning algorithm as well as some serious manual reviews.

On a monthly basis, Google took down 2 million non-compliant pages containing “dangerous and derogatory content,” and ads on 8,700 pages violated the company’s April 2017 publisher policy about “discrimination and intolerance.” Although the number of bad ads removed is nearly 1 billion lower than last year, Spencer writes the number of advertisers and publishers that don’t follow the rules has doubled to “1 million advertiser accounts and 734,000 publishers and app developers.”

Last year Google added “28 new advertiser policies and 20 new publisher policies to combat new threats and improve the ads experience online,” but now they’ve updated the policies to “address ads in unregulated or speculative financial products like binary options, cryptocurrency, foreign exchange markets and contracts for difference (or CFDs)” and gambling, Spencer explains.