Following in the footsteps of Facebook, Google has announced it will ban cryptocurrency and initial coin offering (ICO) promotional material from its ad platform.
Google Cracks Down on Sketchy ICOS & Crypto ADS
Alphabet Inc.’s Google explained the new policy will go into effect in June of this year, affecting its search engine, advertisements on YouTube, and and its display-ads network.
Google’s crackdown is intended mainly to “prevent consumer harm” and follows Facebook, which adopted a similar policy in late January.
Google’s announcement reads:
"This year, we updated several policies to address ads in unregulated or speculative financial products like binary options, cryptocurrency, foreign exchange markets and contracts for difference (or CFDs)."
The number of misleading and malicious advertising, including payday loan ads, ads that intentionally look like system errors, and so-called ‘fake news’ ads, has increased dramatically in recent years, according to a recent ‘bad ads’ report.
“In 2017, we took down more than 3.2 billion ads that violated our advertising policies,” wrote Scott Spencer, Google’s director of sustainable ads, in a blog post Tuesday.
This is an average of 100 ads per second and almost double the number from 2016 of 1.7 billion ads, which also dwarfed the previous figure of 780 million in 2015.
Additionally, Google took down over 130 million ads in 2017 where hackers inserted code to mine for cryptocurrencies, such as Monero, a practice that’s quickly rising in popularity among cyber criminals.
Full article:
http://bitcoinist.com/google-ban-cryptocurrency-ads-bitcoin-not-affected/