Research finds Google violated standards in ad deals, WSJ reports

Nearly 80% of Google’s video ad placements on third-party sites violated promised standards, according to research from Adalytics, a company that helps brands analyze where their ads appear online, The Wall Street Journal’s Patience Haggin reports. The firm has 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. Google said the report “makes many claims that are inaccurate and doesn’t reflect how we keep advertisers safe” and that “As part of our brand safety efforts, we regularly remove ads from partner sites that violate our policies and we’ll take any appropriate actions once the full report is shared with us.”