Google to ban cryptocurrency, initial coin offering ads

changed at US$9,099 as of 1:04 p.m. in Hong Kong. Rival coins Ripple and Ether also pared gains.

The internet-search giant is also restricting ads for financial products including binary options, a risky derivative with an all-ornothing payoff. Right now, Google queries for terms like “binary options” and “buy bitcoin” produce four ads at the top of the results.

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 workarounds 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, 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.

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. 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.

It’s 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 US$95.4 billion in ad revenue, up 20 per cent from 2016.