Google will ban online advertisements promoting cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings starting in June, part of a broader crackdown on the marketing of a new breed of high-risk financial products.<\/p>\n
Facebook Inc took a similar step in January, leaving the two largest web-ad sellers out of reach of the nascent digital-currency sector.<\/p>\n
Alphabet Inc\u2019s Google announced the decision Wednesday night in an update to its policy, which says it will begin to block ads for \u201ccryptocurrencies and related content.\u201d<\/p>\n
The internet-search giant is also restricting ads for financial products including binary options, a risky derivative with an all-or-nothing payoff. Right now, Google queries for terms like \u201cbinary options\u201d and \u201cbuy bitcoin\u201d produce four ads at the top of the results.<\/p>\n
Facebook, Google\u2019s primary rival for ad dollars, banned ads for cryptocurrencies in January. Some aggressive businesses found a loophole: purposely misspelling words like \u201cbitcoin\u201d in their ads.<\/p>\n
A Google spokeswoman said the company\u2019s policies will try to anticipate workarounds like this.<\/p>\n
Google\u2019s updated policy came with the release of its annual \u201cbad ads\u201d report, a review of the number of malicious, deceptive and controversial ads Google scrubs from its massive search, display and video network.<\/p>\n
In 2017, Google said it removed more than 3.2 billion advertisements from the web. That\u2019s up from 1.7 billion in 2016.<\/p>\n
Last year, for instance, Google pulled 79 million ads for luring online clickers to websites with malware. Google is also accelerating a push against misleading content.<\/p>\n
The company suspended 7,000 customer accounts for ads that impersonated a news article \u2014 what Google calls \u201ctabloid cloaking\u201d \u2014 and blocked more than 12,000 websites for copying information from other publications.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s unlikely that the 3.2 billion ads pulled in 2017, nor the coming cryptocurrency ban, will have a serious impact on sales. Last year, Google generated $95.4 billion in ad revenue, up 20 percent from 2016.<\/p>\n