Google released earlier today its annual update which states the progress it has made to improve its ad business.
Through both manual reviews and machine learning, Google said that last year it removed 2.3 billion ads that violated its policies. Many of these ads were deemed “bad” because they misled or exploited vulnerable people. In addition, Google has worked at finding and shutting down sites that violate policies while profiting from using its ad network. The company also removed ads from 1.5 million apps and roughly 28 million pages that also had violated policies.
To keep the bad ads out, Google also announced that it would be implementing a new Ad Policy Manager in April. This manager would help publishers list compliant ads.
The ad service made more than $32 billion for Google last quarter, which is roughly 83% of all of the company’s revenues. The ad machine helps to support free services such as Gmail, Youtube, and its search engine.
While Google continues to improve its ability to stop bad ads from being published in the first place, it still has a long way to go. In 2017, Google removed nearly 3.2 billion ads due to policy violations. Google says that it removed last ads this year because the company is focusing more on eliminating bad accounts, rather than individual bad ads.
Google did remove nearly double the number of bad accounts in 2018 than it did in 2017, which could mean that less bad ads can be published in the first place.
“By removing one bad account, we’re blocking someone who could potentially run thousands of bad ads,” a Google spokesperson said. “This helps to address the root cause of bad ads and allows us to better protect our users.”
