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Awful advertising comes at a price but the struggle against it’s being won according to Google. It asserts that in 2014 it handicapped over 524 million ads that are poor and prohibited more than 214,000 advertisers.
Of these 7,000 advertisers were prohibited for boosting products. This was also a drop on the 82,000 banned in 2012 and of the range of 2013. It states that its enforcement systems that are innovative are difficult for counterfeiters.
Another problem for consumers can be ads pointing to sites hosting malware — whether malicious applications. Google says that 2014 saw it remove 250,000 websites from its own network for hiding malware.
Weight-loss problem
The company is also currently working to overcome the weighty issue of weight loss scams online for those advertisers using intense, inaccurate claims to market their supplements. Google is operating alongside peers such as AOL and Yahoo in a group called TrustInAds.org which claims to have eliminated or rejected 2.5 million such advertisements in the previous 18 months.
Google’s director of advertisements stated that Google remains committed to reducing bad marketing incidents if they’re deemed poor due to advertisements counterfeit goods spyware and malware or worse. It employs a group of analysts working around the clock to detect such incidents, supported by continued investment and development of detection technology to highlight advertising.
“That is a continuously evolving fight,” said Gupta. “Bad actors always create more sophisticated systems and scams, therefore we are constantly evolving our practices, engineering, and methodology in fighting these undesirable ads. The safety of our users is the base of our ecosystem, and we’ll continue to work tirelessly to keep people secure online.”
