Google to ban all cryptocurrency and ICO ads

Back in January, Facebook banned advertisements of cryptocurrencies and ICOs from all crypto exchanges, afterward Twitter started crackdown against crypto scammers. And now, another tech giant, which is widely renowned for its range of internet products and services, Google is planning to ban online advertisements promoting cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings (ICOs) from June.

Alphabet Inc. owned Google LLC has recently announced that it is going to block ads for “cryptocurrencies and related content” in its updated policy, as reported by Bloomberg. This means that even companies with legitimate cryptocurrency offerings won’t be able to publish their advertisements via Google’s ad platform, which places ads on its own sites as well as third-party websites.

Google’s updated policy for crypto and ICO ads has been announced by the company along with its “trust and safety” ads report which is comprised of a review of malicious and deceptive ads of online scammers from its search engine, third-party websites and its video network.

According to a company’s blog post, Google removed around 3.2 billion ‘bad ads’ and blocked over 320 thousand publishers, 90 thousand websites, and 700 thousand mobile apps from using its ads network. Meanwhile, the updated policy of Google for crypto and ICO ads will be effectively implemented from June 2018. Google’s director of sustainable ads, Scott Spencer believes that the company is precautious about a potential harm that these ads can do, as he stated,

“We don’t have a crystal ball to know where the future is going to go with cryptocurrencies, but we’ve seen enough consumer harm or potential for consumer harm that it’s an area that we want to approach with extreme caution.”

The search giant Google is also imposing a ban on ads for financial products including binary options, a risky contract with an all-or-nothing in reward. As the ads are not banned at the moment, so Google queries for terms like “binary options” and “buy bitcoin” give four ads at the top of the search results.

It must be noted that Google makes roughly 84 percent of its total revenue from advertising and the company earned record-breaking $27.27 billion revenue in ads’ business in 2017. Imposing a ban on crypto and ICO might not affect Google’s huge sum of revenue in near future.