Google removed 1.7 billion ads that violated terms and conditions in 2016

In 2016, compared to the previous year, Google took more than twice as many ads offline that violated the company’s terms. Among other things, many advertisements were removed that were intended to entice internet users to take out loans.

In 2016, Google removed a total of 1.7 billion ads, compared to 780 million in 2015. In its annual Bad Ads report, Google gives the reasons for the increase. Among other things, the company has tightened its policy to prevent misleading advertisements and ‘predatory’ offers.

That happened in July and resulted in the taking of five million ads in the following six months, enticing people to take out personal loans. In addition, Google claims to have adapted its technology in such a way that harmful advertisements can be disabled more quickly. This allowed the search giant to detect and deactivate 112 million ‘trick to click’ ads in 2016. This would be six times more than in 2015.

Google gives many more examples of ads that were removed because they were unacceptable. The company removed 68 million dubious ads offering drugs. This was 12.5 million in 2015. Eighty million misleading advertisements were also deactivated. In addition, Google took action against what the company calls “self-clicking” ads. This unexpectedly redirects the user to an app page in the Play Store. In 2015, Google discovered several thousand ‘self-clicking’ ads, in 2016 that increased to more than 23,000.