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In 2020, Google would have blocked over 99 million Covid-19-related advertising.
According to Google's annual Advertising Safety Report released earlier this week, over 99 million Covid-19-related ads will be blocked from serving in 2020.
“As claims and conspiracies about the coronavirus’ origin and spread were circulated online, we launched a new policy to prohibit both ads and monetized content about Covid-19 or other global health emergencies that contradict scientific consensus,” the tech giant said in a blog post.
“In total, we blocked over 99 million Covid-related ads from serving throughout the year, including those for miracle cures, N95 masks due to supply shortages, and most recently, fake vaccine doses,” it said.
In total, the tech giant has banned or eliminated almost 3.1 billion advertisements for breaking its rules, with a further 6.4 billion ads set to be restricted in 2020. It also added or revised more than 40 policies for marketers and publishers, all with the goal of providing a healthy environment for users, authors, publishers, and advertisers.
Restriction on advertising and other laws
This year, for the first time, Google revealed information about ad limits, which are an important part of its overall strategy.
“Over the past several years, we’ve seen an increase in country-specific ad regulations, and restricting ads allows us to help advertisers follow these requirements regionally with minimal impact on their broader campaigns,” it said.
It also increased its investment in automated detection technology, which allows it to “effectively search the site for publisher policy enforcement at scale.”
Google pulled advertising from 1.3 billion publisher pages in 2020, up from 21 million in 2019, as a result of this investment and other new policies.
“We also stopped ads from serving on over 1.6 million publisher sites with pervasive or egregious violations,” it added.
In 2020, the number of ad accounts disabled due to policy breaches rose by 70%, from 1 million to over 1.7 million.
“We also blocked or removed over 867 million ads for attempting to evade our detection systems, including cloaking, and an additional 101 million ads for violating our misrepresentation policies. That’s a total of over 968 million ads,” it said.
It said that under its dangerous and derogatory strategy, it took action on nearly 168 million pages for content such as hate speech and calls to violence online.
