Google Inc has decided to follow Facebook in preventing its search engine platform and other channels from being used to promote cryptocurrencies. This ban on advertisements promoting cryptocurrencies or initial offerings of the coins will come into effect starting June 2018.
Googles sees these as high-risk financial products and it would not want to be held accountable for misleading the public and be a carrier of such messages.
According to a policy announcement made by Google on March 14, it has been clarified that apart from cryptocurrencies and related content, ads for financial products, including binary options, an all-or-nothing payoff derivative, considered a risky instrument will also be banned by Google. These instruments are being currently advertised on the search engine’s pages when queries like “binary options” and “buy bitcoin” are input in the search box.
Google will also work on some of the learnings from the implementation of a similar ban by Facebook from this January. In particular, some smart businesses using misspelt words to get around the ban will be duly addressed by Google on its site.
Google is already encountering such difficulties as evidenced in the “bad ads” report which was released recently. The report, a regular yearly exercise, says Google found and removed 3.2 billion advertisements described as malicious, deceptive and controversial ads, from its search engine, display and video network in the calendar year 2017.
This has jumped from 1.7 billion such content removed in 2016. Some of the typical contents that Google had to scrub include malicious, 79 million ads were those that attracted people to click on ads that would carry them to sites with malware. Besides this, there were ads which are described by Google as “tabloid cloaking” which are impersonated personal articles and 7000 accounts which carried these contents had been removed by Google. Website which copied content from other publications were also detected and 12, 000 such sites were blocked.
Google may not face any serious drop in its revenue due to these restrictions.