If you ever wondered about the scale at which large digital platforms conduct their content enforcement on a day-to-day basis, the results might actually surprise you. This should help – Google published its 2022 Ads Safety Report, which outlines all of the ads and websites that Google took action against over the last year. While you might have an idea of the amount, it’s still pretty awe-inspiring.
“Our continued investment in policy development and enforcement enabled us to block or remove over 5.2 billion ads, restrict over 4.3 billion ads, and suspend over 6.7 million advertiser accounts. And we blocked or restricted ads from serving more than 1.57 billion publisher pages and across more than 143,000 publisher sites, up from 63,000 in 2021.”
To Enforce
5.2 billion ads were removed. That’s an incredible amount of violative ads – roughly 65% of the Earth’s current population. This is coming up from the 2 billion ad removals back in 2021. Among the key reasons for blocking those billions of ads were trademark violations, legal requirements, and misinterpretations within the promotions.
However, the top reason is ‘Abusing the Ad Network’, which essentially relates to spammers and scammers trying to use the system to dupe users. It’s also interesting to note that between the top 1 and 2 reasons, the gap is nearly double the amount, which further highlights the prevalence of exploiting the ad network.
Google also restricted a range of ads to a few categories, with ‘Restricted Businesses’ and ‘Local Legal Requirements’ topping the removal charts at 550 million and 503 million, respectively. Meanwhile, Google also took action against a range of websites taking part in its AdSense program, which enables publishers to display Google ads on their sites.
The top reasons for these restrictions are related to inappropriate and harmful content on these sites. Even the reasons have reasons, so that should tell you how much work large digital companies really do on a daily basis.
The Wrap
It’s an interesting overview of the online ads landscape and the scale of activity required to protect users from abuse and scams. Google has also removed more than 50,000 YouTube channels and AdSense accounts created by China-based influence operations, among others, which is a whole other element of its content enforcement activity. Negative online actors constantly evolve their tactics, so Google and other similarly-sized firms should do the same. These numbers underline the need for platforms to stay vigilant.
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