Over the past couple months, Google has been faced with immense backlash over its advert placement practices. With regards to the same, Mountain view is today introducing two new features to its AdSense network to ease the scrutiny over its publishers. It has already dealt some massive blows to the earnings of several websites/YouTube creators due to lack of major brands and advertisers. Thus, it is now taking steps to be more stringent in its action towards policy violations but easing its stance on how ad removal happens.
As announced via an official blog post, Google has today announced that it is introducing two prominent changes to how publishers will be benefitted from the AdSense network. One, Mountain View will no longer remove ads from the complete website when a policy violation against the website/YouTuber’s offending content is registered. It will now take a more focused and precise approach to block ads from particular pages or links rather than from the complete website.
This has been made possible to some technological change towards policy violations in the company’s AdSense network. Earlier, the tech giant used to block ads from the complete website when bad content such as anti-semitic views, porn, or hate speech was seen on the partner’s website. The changes, however, now enable Google to act ‘more quickly and more precisely’ when action is needed against content on a website/YouTube channel.
Scott Spencer, Director of Project Management, Sustainable Ads at Google talks about this change as under:
Historically, for most policy violations, we remove all ads from a publisher’s site. 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.
This means Google, as well as creators, can now earn ads on their website with fewer hassles. The good content remains monetized, while you’re trying to sort out the policy violations handed down to you. The website or the publisher will now only be taken off the AdSense network in the case of egregious or persistent violations.
Further, he mentions that the ad publishers have been demanding more transparency in the policy violation and response process for quite some time. And Google is taking a right step in this direction by providing them access to info on why ads were removed from their website. It is today debuting a Policy Center, which will also tell you the steps which can be taken to resolve the issue and minimize the impact on the website’s bottomline.
This will be a one-stop destination to gain access to all you policy violations till date — be it for a particular page or the complete website. As mentioned above, you will have access to step-by-step instructions for resolving the policy violations and you can re-monetize your content once the problem is resolved. The said solution has been under testing for months, about which Spencer in a statement said:
We have been piloting this Policy Center with thousands of AdSense publishers, who have been very positive about these changes—and provided great feedback and suggestions on how to make the Policy Center more useful.
Google further mentions that Policy Center will become a ‘central’ resource for websites/creators, hence it will be added to other publisher platforms in the coming months. It will not only be restricted to the AdSense network, to which it has been added today. It has recently also made changes to its ad-dispensing policies, where YouTube channels with less than 10,000 views will not have access to monetization. It is also building intelligent tools to handle ads and provide more control to publishers.
These changes, for those unaware, have been released on the heels of Google facing an intense backlash from brands/advertisers, such as Audi, The Guardian, and French advertising giant Havas due to their adverts being placed next to offensive or misleading content. They all boarded off the platform to save their brand image and content creators’ losses started racking up. The update released for the AdSense network today is an effort to curb the said issues and attract advertisers back to the platform.
