Google intent on breaking bad ads and advertisers

Google pulled almost 1 million 'bad' ads per day from its system last year in an attempt to stem the tide of suspect downloads and other malicious online activities.

by Helen Leggatt

In 2012, Google removed about 224 million 'bad ads'. Last year, the company removed 59% more - over 350 million, according to Google ads engineering director, Mike Hochberg, in a recent blog post.

"We've allocated substantial technical, financial, and human resources to stopping bad advertising practices and protecting users on the web," writes Hochberg. "Hundreds of our engineers, policy experts and others have dedicated their careers to this work."

While the number of bad ads being detected and yanked from the system has risen, the number of banned advertisers has dropped year-on-year. In 2012, 850,000 bad advertisers were given the boot compared to 270,000 in 2013.

Google's other achievements that help to maintain a healthy advertising ecosystem include:

- Banned more than 14,000 advertisers for trying to sell counterfeit goods;

- Disabled more than 2 million ads for illegal online pharmacies;

- Disabled more than 5,000 AdSense accounts for violations of their copyright policy;

- Disabled ad-serving for more than 1,800 sites and over 4,000 AdWords accounts linked to third-party remote tech support scams;

- Disabled ads from more than 4,000 websites hiding malware;

- Disabled ads for over 10,000 websites promoting get-rich-quick schemes.

"This is an ever-evolving and ongoing fight," concludes Hochberg. "Bad actors are relentless, often very sophisticated and will not rest on their laurels. But neither will we. Nothing is more important than the security of our users and we'll continue to work tirelessly to keep them safe online."