Google Disabled 49% More Ads in 2015 - Digits - WSJ

Ad quality control

"More than 1,000 of Google’s 60,000 employees monitor and remove ads, an important task because the company gets about 90% of its revenue from advertising. It’s also been hit financially for not adequately monitoring ads. In 2011, the company agreed to pay $500 million to settle allegations by the U.S. Department of Justice that ads for Canadian online pharmacies contributed to the illegal importation of prescription drugs. In the settlement, Google acknowledged it acted “improperly.”

Google blocked more than 12.5 million ads in 2015 for drugs that were unapproved or that made misleading claims, up from 9.6 million a year earlier.

Ads making misleading weight-loss claims were a big source of user complaints last year, prompting Google to suspend more than 30,000 websites from its ad systems. It declined to give a comparable number for 2014."

Google Disabled 49% More Ads in 2015 - Digits - WSJ