Google Blocked 1.7bn Advertisements in 2016

• Google Blocked 1.7bn Advertisements in 2016

Google’s Director of Product Management Sustainable Advertisements, Mr .Scott Spencer, said that Google blocked 1.7 billion advertisements in 2016 for violating its advertising policies.

Spencer said in a statement on Saturday in Lagos that the number was double the bad ads the company took down in 2015.

He said that Google achieved this because of its improved technology.

“If you spent one second taking down each of those bad ads, it’d take you more than 50 years to finish. But our technology is built to work much faster.

“Last year, we did two key things to take down more bad ads. First, we expanded our policies to better protect users from misleading and predatory offers.

“In July we introduced a policy to ban ads for payday loans, which often result in unaffordable payments and high default rates for users.

“In the six months since launching this policy, we disabled more than five million payday loan ads.

“Second, we beefed up our technology so we can spot and disable bad ads even faster.

“For example, ‘trick to click’ ads often appear as system warnings to deceive users into clicking on them, not realising they are often downloading harmful software or malware,” the director said.

He said that in 2016, Google’s systems detected and disabled 112 million ads for ‘trick to click’, which was six times more than in 2015.