This is Interesting

If this story is correct, and the WSJ  has a pretty good record on such things, it appears that Google has been routinely violating the standards that it promised to its advertisers, basically promising to show the ads on high quality sites and then not doing so.

This means that tens of billions of dollars in payments may have to be refunded:

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.

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.

………

Some ad buyers who have reviewed the research say they want their money back.

“This is an unacceptable breach of trust by YouTube,” said Joshua Lowcock, global chief media officer at ad agency UM Worldwide. “Google must fix this and fully refund clients for any fraud and impressions that failed to meet Google’s own policies.”

………

Among the major brands whose Google video-ad placements weren’t in line with the promised standards were Johnson & Johnson, American Express, Samsung, Sephora, Macy’s, Disney+ and The Wall Street Journal, according to Adalytics. It also affected ads for government agencies, including Medicare, the U.S. Army, the Social Security Administration, and the New York City municipal government.

“CMS is concerned with reports of invalid ad placements by YouTube,” said a spokeswoman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

YouTube accounts for 8.3% of U.S. digital-video ad spending, according to research company Insider Intelligence. Marketers feel obligated to advertise on YouTube because of its size, several ad buyers said.

………

Ad placements appeared on low-quality sites that trafficked in misinformation or “clickbait” content, as well as those that appeared to publish pirated content, contrary to the promises of the Google Video Partners program, the researchers found.

………

At least 23% of the $88 billion spent annually by marketers on automated digital ad buying on the open web is wasted, according to the Association of National Advertisers. 

You cannot run the numbers on this, because we don't know the total turnover on YouTube ads, nor do we know the portion of these ads that are purchased through this program, but Google Video Partners and its predecessor Google Preferred have been around since 2015, so it is pretty clear that the numbers can run into the 10 figure, and perhaps the 11 figure range.

This is not a surprise.  As I have noted before (with a focus on the criminal enterprise formerly known as Facebook™), see also here, here, and here, the internet giants are not just unethical and evil, they have been engaging in systematic fraud.

Now is the time to frog march senior executives out of their offices in handcuffs .