Destructive advertising enforcement and our new ways

February 20, 2020

Per Bjorke, Senior Product Manager for Ad Traffic Quality

As part of our ongoing efforts, and with the help of new technologies, today we announced that nearly 600 apps have been removed from the Google Play Store and banned from using our ad-monetization platforms Google AdMob and Google Ad Manager because they violate our destructive advertising policy and the inadmissive interstitial policies.

Mobile ad fraud is an industry-wide challenge that can occur in many different forms and can harm users, advertisers, and publishers. At Google, we have a dedicated team dedicated to detecting and stopping malicious developers who are trying to trick the mobile ecosystem. As part of these efforts, we will take action against developers who create apps that appear harmless but actually violate our advertising policies.

We define destructive ads as ads that are shown to users in unexpected ways, including by impairing or interfering with the availability of device features. Although they can occur within an application, we are seeing an increase in the form of so-called out-of-context ads, which refer to malicious developers serving ads on mobile devices when users are actually inactive in their apps.

This is an intrusive operation that can lead to a poor user experience, often disrupting the functionality of critical devices, and this approach can result in accidental clicks on ads, wasting advertisers' money. For example, suppose you're accidentally running a full-screen ad while trying to make a call, unlock your phone, or navigate progressively using your favorite map app.

Malicious developers continue to become smarter at deploying and blocking destructive ads, but we've developed our own new technology to prevent this behavior. We recently developed an innovative machine learning-based approach that detects when an app displays environmental ads, which led us to announce today that we're starting to implement it.

As we move forward, we will continue to invest in new technologies to detect and block emerging threats that can generate invalid traffic, including destructive advertising, and find more ways to adapt and develop our platform and ecosystem policies to protect users and advertisers from bad behavior.