Google took some heat over ‘ad-supported piracy’ in 2013, with music-industry rightsholders and activists pointing to the large number of piracy websites using Google-powered ads to make money. However, Google’s efforts to tackle the issue have been much more obvious (and thus more welcomed) than in the controversial area of search listings. On Friday, Google provided some figures on “busting bad advertising practices” in 2013, saying it removed more than 350m “bad ads” from its systems last year, while disabling the accounts of more than 270k advertisers. Only a section of that relates to violations of Google’s copyright rules though: the company says it stopped ad-serving on “tens of thousands of sites” in 2013 and disabled more than 5k AdSense accounts on copyright grounds – the latter was up more than 25% year-on-year. “This is an ever-evolving and ongoing fight. Bad actors are relentless, often very sophisticated and will not rest on their laurels. But neither will we,” promised Google’s director of ads engineering Mike Hochberg.
Tools: platforms to help you reach new audiences
Tools: Kaiber
In the year or so since its launch, AI startup Kaiber has been making waves,…