Google, Facebook join alliance to fight bad ads

Google has partnered with the likes of AOL, Facebook, Twitter and the IAB to form the Ads Integrity Alliance in a bid to stop bad ads online.

Unfortunately that doesn’t mean anyone’s going to do anything about the cringeworthy horrors you’re sometimes faced with upon opening a YouTube video.

Instead they’re going after kind of ads that contravene their various individual policies, or promote counterfeit goods and malware.

The alliance falls under the remit of StopBadware, an organisation that aims to “make the Web safer through the prevention, mitigation, and remediation of badware websites”.

StopBadware has been around since 2006 and, according to Google, it:

has enabled many websites, service providers and software providers to share real-time information in order to warn users and significantly eliminate malware (such as viruses, phishing sites and malicious downloads) on the web. We believe that the Ads Integrity Alliance can make a similarly important contribution to the goal of identifying and removing bad ads from all corners of the web.

Google claims that on its own, it disabled more than 130 million ads and 800 000 advertisers that violated its policies on its own and partners’ sites.

The problem, it says, is that as soon as it shuts bad advertisers down, they just pack up and move somewhere else. It reckons that the Ads Integrity Alliance can help stop this happening:

No individual business or law enforcement agency can single-handedly eliminate these bad actors from the entire web. As StopBadware has shown, the best way to tackle common problems across a highly interconnected web, and to move the whole web forward, is for the industry to work together, build best practices and systems, and make information sharing simple.

The alliance will reportedly:

• Develop and share definitions, industry policy recommendations, and best practices
• Serve as a platform for sharing information about bad actors
• Share relevant trends with policymakers and law enforcement agencies

“Bad ads, such as those that facilitate malware distribution or deceive users, diminish the online user experience and threaten trust in the Web,” said Eric Davis, global public policy manager at Google. “The Ads Integrity Alliance will serve as a forum for us to work together to protect users from bad ads and strengthen trust in the advertising ecosystem.”