Google removes 247.4 mn ads in India last year, suspends 2.9 mn ad accounts

• NEW DELHI — Google on Wednesday said that it removed 247.4 million ads in India last year, while suspending 2.9 million advertiser accounts in the country.
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• The top policy violations were financial services, trademark, abusing the ad network, personalised ads and gambling/games, the tech giant said in its ‘2024 Ads Safety Report’.
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• 2024 was a major year for global elections, including in India. “As part of this effort, we continued to expand our identity verification and transparency requirements for election advertisers to new countries,” said the company.
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• In the past year alone, Google verified more than 8,900 new election advertisers and removed 10.7 million election ads from unverified accounts globally.

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• These measures, which include “paid for by” disclosures and a public transparency report of all election ads, help ensure users around the world are able to identify election ads and know who paid for election ads they see.
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• The search engine giant further stated that last year, over 5.1 billion ads were removed, more than 9.1 billion ads were restricted and over 39.2 million advertiser accounts were suspended.
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• Ads on 1.3 billion publisher pages were blocked or restricted and broader site-level enforcement action was taken on over 220,000 publisher sites.
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• Over 30 updates to the Ads and Publisher policies were released in the past year “to continue honing policies”.
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• The company also adapted its defences against ever-evolving scams, notably the rise of AI-generated public figure impersonation ads.
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• “To fight back, a team of over 100 experts was assembled to develop countermeasures, such as updating the Misrepresentation policy to suspend advertisers that promote these scams,” said Google.
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• As a result, more than 700,000 offending advertiser accounts were permanently suspended. This led to a 90 per cent drop in reports of this kind of scam ad last year.
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• With billions worldwide depending on Google for reliable information, including ads, our dedicated team works tirelessly to protect the digital advertising ecosystem, said Google.