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Google blocked or removed 3.4bn ads in 2021

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By John Glenday, Reporter

May 5, 2022 | 3 min read

Google has revealed the full scale of its crackdown on malign marketing messaging across its advertising ecosystem in 2021, a period that saw triple the number of advertiser accounts suspended than the year prior.

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Google trumpets success in bad ad crackdown, with 3.4bn blocked or removed

In a blog post, the internet giant boasted of having blocked or removed a staggering 3.4bn adverts that violated its policies, including 652m ads that were found to have abused the ad network and 286m that contained adult content.

A further 5.6m advertiser accounts were suspended for the most ‘egregious’ violations, a three-fold increase on 2020 when 3.9m suspensions were recorded in areas such as trademark violations, copyright breaches and the misrepresentation of products and services.

In addition, Google claims to have blocked or restricted ads from 1.7bn publisher pages and around 63,000 publisher sites, the vast majority of which (1.27bn) concerned sexual content. A further 192m pages containing ‘dangerous or derogatory’ material, as well as 122m pages promoting weapons sales and 68m hosting ‘shocking’ content, were also purged.

The Ads Safety Report noted: “We continue to roll out new innovations on features like our ‘About this ad’ menu to help you understand why an ad was shown and which advertiser ran it. You can report an ad if you believe it violates one of our policies or block an ad that you aren’t interested in.”

Vowing to continue the fight, Google has pledged to make further investments in policies, experts and enforcement technology to stay ahead of potential threats to brand safety.

By comparison, Google removed 2.3bn adverts in 2018 as part of efforts to rein in fraud and misrepresentation.

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