Adult content, trademarks top list as Google delists 5.6 million advertiser accounts, 3.4 billion ads

According to the Guardian, during the Google Ads Privacy Immersion workshop held in Lagos, the tech giant confirmed over 3.4 billion ads were removed, over 5.7 billion ads were restricted and over 5.6 million advertiser accounts were suspended in its 2021 report.

286.8 million adult materials; 136.9 million trademarks; 125.6 million inappropriate content; 75.1 million gambling and games; 60 million healthcare and medicines formed part of the 652.1 million ads found as abuse on the network and were removed.

Other ads which were labelled as abuse on the network include financial services 58.9 million; alcohol 9.4 million; copyrights 44.2 million; personalized ads 2.2 million; misrepresentation 38.1 million; dangerous products and services 20.6 million; legal requirements 32.6 million; enabling dishonest behavior 7.9 million; and counterfeit goods one million.

Details of the 1.4 billion trademarks restricted by Google include; businesses 511.4 million; financial services 223 million; health care and medicines 219.3 million; alcohol 128.5 million; adult content 126.1 million; gambling and games 108.1 million; legal requirements 105.7million and copyrights 68.6 million.

According to the search giants, it took drastic actions to protect its 1.7 billion publisher pages by blocking or restricting the defaulting ads from serving on the pages. It also announced it made some site-level enforcement action on approximately 63,000 publisher sites in Nigeria and other parts of the world.

Google also revealed that to enable the team to stay ahead of potential threats, it has continued to invest more in enforcement technology, policies and gathering a team of experts.

This is evident from its decision to introduce a multi-strike system for repeat policy violations in 2021 as over 30 policies or restrictions for advertisers and publishers were added or updated.