In 2016, Google removed over 1.7 billion “bad ads” according to their latest blog post detailing how they fought bad ads and scammers last year. Google explains how the company has been working to crack down on scammers, click bait and just overall bad ads, last year, making the open web a bit more enjoyable for everyone. As you would expect, an open and free web relies heavily on ads. Most websites on the web are funded by ads, which makes them necessary. But some ads are scams and shouldn’t be allowed on websites, and somehow got past Google’s reviews.
Google says that they disabled nearly 68 million ads for illegal products. This includes healthcare violations, and this number is up drastically from the 12.5 million in 2015. There were about 80 million misleading ads disabled last year as well. Around 7 million ads were disabled for trying to game the system and about 23,000 ads were bad on mobile. Google has been taking action on these sites and accounts for attempting to promote illegal products and use ads that were misleading. To make sure that they are gone for good.
Alphabet’s co-founder, Larry Page, has been a big proponent of making ads a bit better. Obviously, Google has a vested interest in making ads a bit better and not so misleading, since around 95% of their revenue comes from ads. But with ads being misleading and taking over the entire display, it’s costing Google and Alphabet a ton of cash, as more people are looking for ways to block these ads themselves. So this is a way for Google to fight back against those ad blockers and still generate some revenue. Google will likely continue to work on cracking down on these “bad ads” in 2017, and it wouldn’t be surprising to see the overall number of removed ads increase, this time next year when Google puts out their report regarding 2017. If you are interested in reading up on how Google did fight bad ads in 2016, you can check out the full report located at the source link below.