Google may have misled dozens of advertisers and violated its own guidelines - report

Google has said the study makes extremely inaccurate claims" and stated that advertisers are only paying for ads when they are viewed

Google may have misled dozens of business and government advertisers about the viewership of ads running on third party websites and apps, while charging for them, a new report has claimed.

Google's TrueView is the company's proprietary video ad product that is displayed not only in YouTube but on third party sites and apps across the internet. Users can skip the ad after five seconds, but an advertiser only gets charged if a user watches 30 seconds - or the length of the ad if under 30 seconds - and if the video is playing audio, and isn't activated by a user passively scrolling past it on the page.