Google to Ban Ads on Cryptocurrencies
Google said on Wednesday it will ban advertisements for cryptocurrencies and related content starting in June.
Under the new policy, the company will ban ads for unregulated or speculative financial products like binary options, cryptocurrency and financial spread betting among others.
Google said it took down 3.2 billion ads that violated its advertising policies in 2017, nearly double the number of ads it removed in 2016.
"Improving the ads experience across the web, whether that's removing harmful ads or intrusive ads, will continue to be a top priority for us," Scott Spencer, director of sustainable ads, said.
DoubleClick outage
In related news, Google's DoubleClick for Publishers has suffered five service disruptions in 13 days in March.
On Tuesday, DoubleClick was hit with an outage that slowed Web pages and hit publishers' display ad revenue. Google's workaround advice to publishers was basically to limit tracking and divert marketing to text ads.
Google ultimately said it resolved its DoubleClick issues with the following update:
The problem with DoubleClick Search should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better.
Due to a bug in DoubleClick, we were unable to track and record some ad impressions, clicks and conversions for a period on March 13th (EDT). Some redirects also did not work as intended. For customers who link their DoubleClick and Google Analytics (or Google Analytics 360) accounts, impacted events may not have been recorded.
To mitigate the issue, we briefly paused conversion tracking and automated bidding on DoubleClick Search, and some bidding on DoubleClick Bid Manager.
We have fixed the bug and will continue to monitor over the coming days.