Google Annual Report 2016 – 1,700 Billion Ads Removed, Including Fake News

Google Annual Report 2016 – 1,700 Billion Ads Removed, Including Fake News pixelwork

Google Annual Report 2016 – 1,700 Billion Ads Removed, Including Fake News

The company says efforts to crack down on loan ads, ads that look like system errors and fake news, were the main drivers in driving up removed ads in 2016.

In her annual report Google says it removed more than twice as many ads in 2016 as in 2015 by removing 1,7 billion ads, compared to 780 million removed in 2015.

Google has credited changes for the increase in removed ads.

The new loan ad removal policy went into effect in July. Google says it terminated more than 5 million loan ads since then.

Google also continued to make system updates to be able to more reliably detect incorrect ads, including ads from “click trick” where system error notifications appear so that users download some malware. Google says the number of “trick-to-click” ads it detected and removed increased six-fold from the previous year, to 112 million.

Another of the efforts of 2016 was the detection of more “self-clicking ads” on mobile devices. Although the number is small compared to some of the other detection efforts, Google says it disabled more than 23,000 of these ads in 2016, compared to a few thousand in 2015.

And in a year when “fake news” became news, it is not surprising that fake news ads, or “tabloid-disguised” ads, proliferated. These are the types of ads that look like news or headlines and take users to sites that sell things like weight loss products. Google suspended more than 1,300 accounts in 2016, but says this type of ad is gaining traction because they get clicks.

“During a single sweep in December 2016, we disabled 22 cloakers that were responsible for ads viewed more than 20 million times by people online in a single week.”

On the publisher side, Google updated its AdSense bad content policy in November and says it reviewed 550 sites suspected of spoofing content to users in ways that impersonated news organizations. The company said it took action against 340 for violations and banning of almost 200 AdSense publishers.