Google to Ban Cryptocurrency and Initial Coin Offering Ads

Google will ban online advertisements promoting cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings starting in June, part of a broader crackdown on the marketing of a new breed of high-risk financial products, according to Bloomberg.

The company announced the decision in an update to its policy, which says it will begin to block ads for "cryptocurrencies and related content." Facebook took a similar step in January, leaving the two largest web-ad sellers out of reach of the nascent digital-currency sector.

As a result of that announcement Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market value, slumped to the lowest level in more than a month. It dropped as much as 9.1 percent to $8,238, the lowest price since Feb. 12.

The internet-search giant is also restricting ads for financial products including binary options, a risky derivative with an all-or-nothing payoff. Right now, Google queries for terms like "binary options" and "buy bitcoin" produce four ads at the top of the results.

Google’s updated policy came with the release of its annual "bad ads" report, a review of the number of malicious, deceptive and controversial ads Google scrubs from its massive search, display and video network. In 2017, Google said it removed more than 3.2 billion advertisements from the web. That’s up from 1.7 billion in 2016.

Last year, for instance, Google pulled 79 million ads for luring online clickers to websites with malware. Google is also accelerating a push against misleading content. The company suspended 7,000 customer accounts for ads that impersonated a news article, what Google calls "tabloid cloaking", and blocked more than 12,000 websites for copying information from other publications.