The Internet is a wonderful thing and wealth of endless information, but obtrusive online advertisements can quickly dimish the joy of using it. We already knew that Google made a lot of efforts last year to keep bad ads off the web, but now the company's shed light on just how many violations it dealt with.
In 2017 alone, Google says it removed more than 3.2 billion ads that violated its advertising policies. To put things into perspective, that translates to around 100+ ads being removed every single second for the entire year. Looking more closely at that 3.2 billion number, Google notes it removed 79 million ads that tried sending people to malware-heavy sites, completely eliminated 400,000 of said sites, blocked 66 million "trick to click" ads, and got rid of 48 million ads that tricked users into installing unsafe software.
On the publisher side of things, Google notes:
Last year, we removed 320,000 publishers from our ad network for violating our publisher policies, and blacklisted nearly 90,000 websites and 700,000 mobile apps.
In that same breath, 2 million web pages were removed each month due to policy violations, and 8,700 pages had their Google Ads taken away after Google expanded its online advertising policy last April.
Rounding this out, Google says:
Does an ad with the headline "Ellen DeGeneres adopts a baby elephant!" make you want to click on it? You're not alone. In recent years, scammers have tried to sell diet pills and weight-loss scams by buying ads that look like sensational news headlines but ultimately lead to a website selling something other than news. We suspended more than 7,000 AdWords accounts for tabloid cloaking violations, up from 1,400 in 2016.
Legitimate online ads are needed to make the Internet work the way it does, but pesky, abusive ones do nothing but ruin that whole experience for everyone. We're still a ways away from an Internet that's totally free of these, but it's reassuring to see Google working so diligently on this matter.
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