On Monday, Google announced that it had changed the way it enforces ad removal policies on its ad sales platform AdSense and DoubleClick ad exchange. With these changes, the search giant aims to please publishers by providing more transparency on how it deals with policy violations.
Google makes changes to AdSense
AdSense’s technology has been changed in such a way that it now eliminates ads from individual pages. Simply put, Google’s default now is to eliminate ads on a page-by-page basis. Previously after a policy violation, the ad giant removed the ad from the entire website instead of removing ads from just the pages that had the insulting content. According to the company, these changes will increase transparency about how it responds to policy violations and removes ads from websites.
In a blog post, Scott Spencer, Google’s director of sustainable ads, said, “As we roll out page-level policy action as the new default for content violations, we’ll be able to stop showing ads on select pages, while leaving ads up on the rest of a site’s good content.”
Spencer also warned that they are still using site-level actions, but only as needed.
“And when it’s necessary, such as in the case of egregious or persistent violations, we’ll still terminate publishers.”
Google will also release a new platform called the “Policy Center” in a few weeks to assist publishers in understanding the rules of the program and fixing violations more quickly. The “Policy Center” will tell publishers about the number of violations a page has and for which type of content. It will also offer guidance on how to fix the issue so that ads may resume on the page, notes TechCrunch.
“The policy center also makes it easy for publishers to tell us when policy issues have been resolved and their pages are ready for review,” Spencer said.
More lenient on publishers
Google’s new approach will undoubtedly be more lenient on publishers. Since the Internet company shares revenue from AdSense with publishers, this change will bring more money and less disruption for a website. This change will also likely benefit small websites more as they depend on user-generated content which is at risk of being blacklisted because of their extremist and rogue posts, notes Digiday. This is not much of an issue for larger, higher quality websites.
Google’s latest change comes after a recent boycott of YouTube by advertisers who were concerned about ads running alongside offending content or within inappropriate videos. So its no surprise that Google’s latest move aims to woo publishers.
Advertising is the cornerstone of Google’s business; however, with AdSense, the company relies on publishers to sign up to receive Google-derived ads on their sites. According to the company, it paid over $11 billion in advertising revenue to publishers in 2016. Google AdSense allows online publishers to serve up advertisements with their content. Those ads are targeted to suit a particular audience and a specific theme of any given website.
