Google Violated Its Standards in Ad Deals, Research Finds

Google violated its promised standards when placing video ads on other websites, according to new research that raises questions about the transparency of the tech giant's online-ad business. From a report: Google's YouTube runs ads on its own site and app. But the company also brokers the placement of video ads on other sites across the web through a program called Google Video Partners. Google charges a premium, promising that the ads it places will run on high-quality sites, before the page's main video content, with the audio on, and that brands will only pay for ads that aren't skipped. Google violates those standards about 80% of the time, according to research from Adalytics, a company that helps brands analyze where their ads appear online. The firm accused the company of placing ads in small, muted, automatically-played videos off to the side of a page's main content, on sites that don't meet Google's standards for monetization, among other violations. Adalytics compiled its data by observing campaigns from more than 1,100 brands that got billions of ad impressions between 2020 and 2023. The company shared its findings with The Wall Street Journal. In a statement, Google said the report "makes many claims that are inaccurate and doesn't reflect how we keep advertisers safe."

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