{"id":5619,"date":"2018-03-14T09:30:30","date_gmt":"2018-03-14T09:30:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/?p=5619"},"modified":"2018-03-15T11:52:36","modified_gmt":"2018-03-15T11:52:36","slug":"google-bans-ads-for-dodgy-financial-products-including-cryptos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/2018\/03\/14\/google-bans-ads-for-dodgy-financial-products-including-cryptos\/","title":{"rendered":"Google bans ads for dodgy financial &#8220;products,&#8221; including cryptos"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>First <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/business\/news\/new-ads-policy-improving-integrity-and-security-of-financial-product-and-services-ads\">Facebook<\/a> \u2014 and now Google has just <a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/adwordspolicy\/answer\/7648803?hl=en&amp;ref_topic=29265\">banned AdWords advertising for cryptos<\/a> \u2014 in a move that shouldn&#8217;t come as a surprise.<\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/adwordspolicy\/answer\/7648803?hl=en&amp;ref_topic=29265\">notice of the ban<\/a> details a pile of questionable financial products this hits:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Contract_for_difference\">Contracts for Difference<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.handbook.fca.org.uk\/handbook\/glossary\/G1035.html\">Rolling spot forex<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/business\/2016\/dec\/06\/what-is-financial-spread-betting-why-do-most-people-lose-money\">Financial spread betting<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Binary_option\">Binary options<\/a> and synonymous products<\/li>\n<li>Cryptocurrencies and related content<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Those first four are literally straight-up gambling\u00a0\u2014 just on finance numbers instead of horses or football. They&#8217;re barely &#8220;products.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re a professional trader, or you&#8217;re an experienced investor who knows what &#8220;seriously risky&#8221; means, that&#8217;s one thing, because for you those first few are tools with specific use cases \u2014 but marketing this stuff to random Internet users is clearly <a href=\"https:\/\/www.moneyadviceservice.org.uk\/en\/articles\/financial-mis-selling-what-to-do-if-you-think-its-affected-you\">misselling.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Cryptos really aren&#8217;t much better. Casual traders are just having a bet. That&#8217;s fine\u00a0\u2014 if you want to drop a few quid on some ether and watch it go up and down, I can&#8217;t stop you\u00a0\u2014 but advertising it as an investment product to retail customers is unethical misselling.<\/p>\n<p>We shouldn&#8217;t be seeing Tube ads for cryptos, and we <em>definitely<\/em> shouldn&#8217;t be seeing random browser ads for cryptos.<\/p>\n<p>The only bad thing is that this isn&#8217;t kicking in until June.<\/p>\n<p>But this has clearly been coming. Finance Magnates <a href=\"https:\/\/www.financemagnates.com\/cryptocurrency\/news\/exclusive-google-quietly-purging-cryptocurrency-ads-content\/\">ran a piece last week<\/a> about drops in ad performance, Google blocking some ads, demonetising some YouTube videos, and even blocking AdWords or YouTube accounts. This is best explained as tightening their <a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/adwordspolicy\/answer\/2464998\">existing rules on ads for financial products.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/2018\/03\/14\/google-bans-ads-for-dodgy-financial-products-including-cryptos\/trend-micro-coinhive-ads-january\/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-5625\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-5625\" src=\"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/trend-micro-coinhive-ads-january.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"80%\" srcset=\"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/trend-micro-coinhive-ads-january.jpg 1231w, https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/trend-micro-coinhive-ads-january-300x155.jpg 300w, https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/trend-micro-coinhive-ads-january-768x397.jpg 768w, https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/03\/trend-micro-coinhive-ads-january-1024x530.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1231px) 100vw, 1231px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><small><em>Trend Micro graph of a <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.trendmicro.com\/trendlabs-security-intelligence\/malvertising-campaign-abuses-googles-doubleclick-to-deliver-cryptocurrency-miners\/\">January AdWords campaign<\/a> running CoinHive in advertisements<\/em><small><\/small><\/small><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Google&#8217;s been unhappy with cryptos and advertising for a while \u2014 YouTube had problems in January with <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.trendmicro.com\/trendlabs-security-intelligence\/malvertising-campaign-abuses-googles-doubleclick-to-deliver-cryptocurrency-miners\/\">ads running CoinHive<\/a> to mine Monero in viewers&#8217; browsers.<\/p>\n<p>Crypto ads on Facebook resorted to the time-honoured email spammer technique of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/news\/articles\/2018-02-09\/cryptocurrency-ads-find-ways-around-facebook-s-ban\">misspelling the names of cryptos,<\/a> or using Unicode symbols that looked like the same letters. Google can see this one coming and will be <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/news\/articles\/2018-03-14\/google-to-ban-cryptocurrency-initial-coin-offering-ads-in-june\">looking out for it.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<br><br><div align=\"center\"><p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.patreon.com\/bePatron?u=8420236\"><img src=\"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/become_a_patron_button.svg\" alt=\"Become a Patron!\" title=\"Become a Patron!\" width=217 height=51><\/a><br><p style=\"align:center;\" class=\"patreon-badge\"><i>Your subscriptions keep this site going. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.patreon.com\/bePatron?u=8420236\">Sign up today!<\/a><\/i><\/p><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After the Facebook ban, nobody should be surprised that Google AdWords is banning crypto ads too \u2014 along with several other dodgy financial &#8220;products.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[534,102],"class_list":["post-5619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised","tag-finance-magnates","tag-google"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5619"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5619\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5656,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5619\/revisions\/5656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}