Google to ban Bitcoin, other cryptocurrencies advertisements from June

Facebook, Google’s primary rival for ad dollars, banned ads for cryptocurrencies in January. Some aggressive businesses found a loophole: purposely misspelling words like “bitcoin” in their ads. A Google spokeswoman said the company’s policies will try to anticipate work arounds like this .

Google’s updated policy came with the release of its annual “bad ads” report, a review of the number of malicious, deceptive and controversial ads Google scrubs from its massive search. image source: Reuters

Google will ban advertisements promoting cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings from June. In an update of its policy, Google announced this decision on Wednesday. According to the policy, it will block all the advertisements related to “cryptocurrencies and related content.” 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 “binary options” and “buy bitcoin” produce four ads at the top of the results, reports Bloomberg.

In January, Facebook took a similar step by blocking advertisements for cryptocurrencies. Facebook, Google’s primary rival for ad dollars, banned ads for cryptocurrencies in January. Some aggressive businesses found a loophole: purposely misspelling words like “bitcoin” in their ads. A Google spokeswoman said the company’s policies will try to anticipate work arounds like this, as per the report.

According to the report, Google’s updated policy came with the release of its annual “bad ads” report, a review of the number of malicious, deceptive and controversial ads Google scrubs from its massive search, display and video network.

In 2017, Google said it removed more than 3.2 billion advertisements from the web. That’s up from 1.7 billion in 2016.

Along with its accelerated push against misleading content, Google pulled 79 million advertisements last year that lured clickers to websites with malware.

Bloomberg reported that the company suspended 7,000 customer accounts for ads that impersonated a news article—what Google calls “tabloid cloaking”—and blocked more than 12,000 websites for copying information from other publications.

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