Google Ends Cryptocurrency Ad Ban For Certain Kinds of Ads

Earlier this year, Google updated its financial services-ad policies to ban any advertising about cryptocurrency-related content, including initial coin offerings (ICOs), wallets, and trading advice. Google appears to be reversing course with a new policy starting in October that will allow regulated cryptocurrency exchanges to buy ads in the U.S. and Japan. Advertising about ICOs, wallets and trading advice are reportedly still not allowed. CNBC reports: Google's updated policy applies to advertisers all over the world, though the ads can only run in the U.S. and Japan, and interested parties will need to apply for certification to serve ads in each country individually. Google's move follows Facebook, which started allowing pre-approved cryptocurrency advertisers in June. Google parent company Alphabet gets roughly 86 percent of its total revenue from advertising. The company booked more than $54 billion in ad revenue in the first half of 2018.

from the change-of-heart dept.

[rmdingler]

I'd like to enter a motion this front page story be reconsidered for placement in the it-was-only-a-matter-of-time dept.

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[Mathinker]

> it-was-only-a-matter-of-time dept.

Personally, I think it belongs in the dept. of it-is-only-a-matter-of-profits (or possibly it-is-only-a-matter-of-money, if you want to spin it with a double entendre).

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[Shikaku]

Google does suck in a lot of ways, not a lot of people are going to disagree with you. Even their open source projects are just vendor lock-in traps, you can't actually call a device "Android" and sell it without installing a number of apps including Google Play.

54 billion?!

[glitch!]

More than two decades ago, I spent time in Radio Shack. The advertising expense to sales as seven percent. Assuming this is a valid number for retail, that implies that the Google advertisers got 770 billions of sales from their 54 billion in advertising expenses. Did these sellers really get almost a trillion dollars of sales from that expense?! Just wondering.

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[Zocalo]

Advertising RoI is a notoriously difficult things to pin down, no matter what the snake oil salespeople in ad-sales, SEO, and marketing would have you believe. For the right ad, that hits the right audience, at the right time, I have no doubt that you'd easily be able to exceed that 7% figure; the rest are far more subjective - there was a story doing the rounds recently that Google's ad-sales people know that statistically most ad-agencies - the middle-men between Google and the company trying to shift an

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[rtb61]

That is a used to be figure, where due to the limited media market, you could go with saturation advertising. Flooding out all media channels and keeping your opposition out for a short time, to really pump up sales. But now, saturation is impossible, there is a veritable flood of advertising, whilst in total volume it is massive, any particular product or services, scream to buy me, are straight up drowned out by the flood.

Also as people become less used to ad, due to much ad free content being available,