Crypto Firms Confirmed ‘Ethereum Ads’ Banned By GOOGLE

A crypto startup ‘Decenter’ in Serbia realized that its advertisements are not reflected in certain regions. Furthermore, when the firm investigated it was found that the advertisement which uses ‘Ethereum’ as an ad keyword are blacklisted by Google and is not reflected in the search results. Decenter recently claimed it on its Twitter handle. Then official Google Ads account replied tweeting that cryptocurrency exchanges targeting the U.S and Japan can be advertised on the platform while those targeting other countries can be a subject to ad rejection.

Reason Why Companies Having Trouble Google Ads With Ethereum As An Ad Keyword

Decenter attempted to contact Google in order to get clarification on it. An official from the startup quoted that :

“We’ve been using Google Ads for the past 6 months to help us get more visibility for our smart contract auditing services and we’ve noticed a strange change in the last few days. It seems that Google completely blacklisted Ethereum as a keyword. Any of the keywords that contain ‘ethereum’ in our campaigns are no longer showing ads as of January 9th.”

Yet not able to receive the clarification from Google, he added. It is then presumed that Google might have not blacklisted Ethereum ads in general but because a large number of scams and fraudulent operations happened in cryptocurrency sector in the year 2018.

In March 2018, Google executive Scott Spender said;

“We don’t have a crystal ball to know where the future is going to go with cryptocurrencies, but we’ve seen enough consumer harm or potential for consumer harm that it’s an area that we want to approach with extreme caution.”

when Google implemented a ban on cryptocurrency ads. It only happened because of an inflow of scam-related promotions on the platform. In September 2018, 5-month post that blanket ban, Google announced the resumption of cryptocurrency ads to a restricted group of companies under a strict regulatory guideline which is yet undisclosed. The startups or lesser-known companies in the ecosystem of cryptocurrency will not get the acceptance for their advertisement applications on the search engine.

Decenter explained that are seeing the error message while posting ads with “Ethereum development services” and “Ethereum security audits” keywords. To which Google Ads’ official account replied:

“Although we wouldn’t be able to preemptively confirm if your keyword is eligible to trigger ads, we’d recommend that you refer to the ‘Cryptocurrencies’ section of our policy on Financial products and services.”