Google Banned 780m Adverts Last Year
The search giant blocked about 800m ads from its online ad networks in 2015 as it continued to fight advertising fraud. Google announced that it disabled over 780 million ads in 2015, which is about a 50% increase from 2014. The company also promised to make a major focus on intensifying the efforts to fight back against bots – software that mimics the behavior of Internet users – in 2016.
Google officially announced that this year it was going to implement updates – for example, it will further restrict what can be advertised as effective for weight loss and add new protections against malware and bots. The company is committed to making sure all the adverts seen by the users are helpful and welcome and promised to keep fighting to make that a reality.
This announcement was made amid rising scrutiny and criticism by advertisers of the real efficiency of ad campaigns run across Google’s networks. In response, Google explained that its fight with “bad” ads last year in 2015 focused on blocking ads carrying malware, promoting fake products or weight-loss scams, or phishing for personal data by financial fraudsters. Its representatives said that a combination of computer algorithms and experts reviewing ads were used to block the vast majority of the adverts before they ever got shown. Now Google invested in sophisticated technology and created a team of more than 1,000 people engaged in fighting “bad” ads.
Here is some statistics on the “bad” ads crackdown last year: the company stopped displaying advertisements on over 25,000 mobile applications due to policy violations. Google also said it rejected over 1.4 million apps from website and app developers trying to run Google ads without following policies. It also rejected more than 17m ads that misled or tricked people into clicking on them, including those pretending to be system warnings. The company suspended over 10,000 websites and 18,000 accounts for trying to sell counterfeit products. It banned over 12.5 million ads for breaking the rules on advertising healthcare and medical products, over 30,000 websites for making misleading weight-loss claims, about 7,000 websites for phishing for web users’ personal data, and disabled over 10,000 websites offering unwanted software.
Apple Earned $1bn on Simply Making Google Default iOS Search Engine
Everyone knows that Apple and Google are rivals in their niche – iOS vs. Android, iPhone vs. Nexus, etc. This is why some may wonder why Google is the default search engine for mobile Safari, Apple’s pre-installed web browser on its devices. The answer is simple enough: Google paid Apple $1bn in 2014 for being the default search for the hundreds of millions of iPhone users. By the way, this fact was revealed during Google’s lawsuit with another tech giant Oracle, which accused Google of infringing on its patents for the programming language Java in its Android OS.
Aside from the $1bn payment, it also became known that Apple and Google shared a portion of the revenue the search giant received from showing adverts to iOS users. This allowed Google to remain the default search engine for mobile Safari and cash in on iOS. In the meantime, the industry experts point out that being the default is important: for example, when Apple switched from Google Maps to its own in-house team for the default map app on iPhones, the new app was heavily criticized for its error-ridden maps. However, 3 years on, the default app was used 3 times as much as Google’s own app, which means that Google can’t get data from millions of users or show them ads.
Meanwhile, Google search is not used anymore elsewhere in iOS: for instance, the default and the only search engine on Apple’s Siri is Microsoft’s Bing. During the same lawsuit, it became clear why Google was so eager to pay Apple for access to its users: $1bn is drop in the ocean for the company, as Google’s Android OS became the most popular in the world and has generated revenue of $31bn and profit of $22bn in its lifetime. This can be compared with Apple’s revenue from the iPhone in the 4th quarter of 2015 alone: more than $32bn – and it doesn’t include its income from the App Store and iAd platforms.
So, why are iOS users as valuable to Google as Android users? Because Google makes money from Android only by receiving a share of the sales of apps and media on the Google Play Store and displaying ads to Android users, while it gets nothing from the sale of Android phones (except its own Nexus and Pixel-branded devices). In other words, Google has a chance to profit from iOS users by showing them ads without having to develop a whole operating system for them.