Google has on average been removing 100 “bad ads” per second as of 2017, having revealed as much in a recent statement provided to The Wall Street Journal. The company’s digital advertising platform has been targeted by scammers for many years now but the issue persists despite its best efforts to combat it. This Friday, Alphabet’s subsidiary announced a new initiative specifically aimed at curbing tech support scams that have been multiplying in recent times. Effective immediately, the policy will significantly limit any attempts at promoting third-party technical support services via Google, with the change going live on a global level.
The Mountain View, California-based tech giant will start vetting and verifying any parties interested in advertising such solutions so as to ensure only legitimate businesses are able to leverage its marketing platform to reach end users, according to David Graff, Global Product Policy Director at Google. The vetting process is the firm’s ultimate solution for combating scammers and still hasn’t been fully designed, though the technology juggernaut is rapidly working on the matter and hopes to have the initiative live in all parts of the world by the end of the year. Many scams that have been emerging in recent years target Apple customers, with scammers falsely representing themselves as Apple employees convincing less tech-savvy users their devices have been compromised with the goal of cheating them out of hundreds of dollars for placebo solutions advertised with vague technical jargon.
It’s presently unclear whether Google has any immediate plans to crack down on bad ads spanning other product and service categories on its platform, though the company is likely closely monitoring anything that could negatively affect its main revenue growth engine. Google’s power in the digital advertising market and practices that enabled it recently ended up in the crosshairs of the European Union’s antitrust regulators, with the firm presently being in the process of appealing multi-billion-dollar fines.