The Internet is a vast universe in itself and there seems to be a place for just about anything under the sun. That obviously includes millions of websites dedicated to online gambling. Though one would not necessarily guess that the number is indeed this high.
17 million bad ads removed
How Google manages to monitor the Internet and all the ads that are being posted everywhere is something none of us can truly fathom, considering the huge number of ads available online. In a report the company revealed that 1.7 billion so-called bad adds have been removed in 2016. Those ads were non-compliant either with Google’s own terms or were illegal in the countries they were advertised in.
Out of those 1.7 billion bad ads, 1 percent were actually gambling related ads. That amounts to 17 million bad ads that have been removed. Those figures are quite staggering.
Google reported that the number of those bad ads had increased in comparison to 2015. Indeed, the total number of ads blocked has actually doubled from the previous year.
Usually the blocked sites either have no authority to advertise in the way they do, most often in the country they are advertising in, or other advertising policies had been violated by these ads.
Millions of bad ads in other sectors
If you think that gambling ads are bad and apparently increasing in number, you have to wonder what the remaining more than 1.5 billion bad ads were actually for. Well, Google provided some numbers for that as well. 68 million ads, for instance, contained pharmaceutical products, usually of the hoax variation. Another 80 million ads were simply advertising misleading content, whilst 5 million payday loan ads were also removed.
The biggest perpetrator were malware download ads, where the number was 112 million.
Google upgraded their technology to spot violators of this kind, which also allows to block them quickly and efficiently.
Considering how many ads we are still inundated with, some of which we might still consider “bad” and most certainly unwanted, we should be grateful that this measure is in place at all. Ultimately this is no different than other monitoring system that regulate ads on TV for instance. Here the UK is currently considering banning daytime gambling ads from TV altogether.