Google took down 17m gambling-related “bad ads” in 2016

Gambling advertisements accounted for 1% of the “bad ads’ that technology giant Google took exception with in 2016.

On Wednesday, Scott Spencer, Google’s Director of Product Management, Sustainable Ads, posted a blog about how the search engine mainstay “fought bad ads, sites and scammers” in 2016. Spencer said Google took down 1.7b ads that violated its advertising policies in 2016, up from 780m ads that were found objectionable in 2015.

Among those ads earning Google’s ire were over 17m “gambling-related promotions without proper authorization from regulators in the countries they operate.” Spencer said Google saw “more attempts” to sneak these gambling ads past the gatekeepers in 2016 but offered no more specific comparisons with 2015’s figures.

While gambling’s bad ad number sounds massive, it pales in comparison to the 68m ads that violated Google’s healthcare policies, a 500% increase from the 12.5m in 2015.