Google may have deceived dozens of advertisers; violated own guidelines: report

A recent investigation revealed that Google may have misled dozens of commercial and governmental advertisers about the number of people who saw the ads they were paying for to appear on third people's websites and apps.

Google's TrueView is a proprietary video ad solution that is used on other websites and apps in addition to YouTube. Users have the option to skip the advertisement after five seconds, however in order to be charged, a user must view 30 seconds of the advertisement, or the whole duration if it is less than 30 seconds, and the advertisement must play audio in order to be active.

Adalytics, a company that researches the advertising industry, published a study this week stating that its investigation revealed that many advertisers who pay for TrueView ads to appear outside of YouTube on other websites and applications may not be receiving what they paid for, the Guardian reported.

The company looked at the online advertising campaigns of more than 1,000 brands and discovered that many of the TrueView ads did not adhere to Google's own policies. Examples of these ads include those that appeared in tiny video players at the bottom or side of the screen, were completely muted, had no actual video content in between them, or ran with little user interaction.

The NYTimes, Reuters, Wired, Mashable, and Gizmodo are among the websites that feature muted TrueView advertisements.

The study also discovered advertising that made it challenging for consumers to skip beyond five seconds by concealing or covering the skip button.

According to the group, the mid-identified ads began airing in 2020.

One advertiser told Adalytics that this “is a method for YouTube and Google to extract more budget and manufacture scale in a way that is palatable to the advertiser because they don’t fully understand it.”

The US government, the EU parliament, New York City and a Delaware police department are among the government advertisers on the service. Businesses using TrueView include Ernst & Young, American Express, TikTok, Disney+, IBM, HBO Max and Pizza Hut.

One consumer goods company included in the research found that 20% of its $75,000 marketing budget went to YouTube channels, while 80% went to third-party apps and websites like investing.com and Candy Crush Saga for Android.

Marvin Renaud, director of global video solutions at Google, refuted the report's conclusions in a blog post on Tuesday, calling them "extremely inaccurate claims" and stating that advertisers only pay for ads when they are viewed.

“We use real-time ad quality signals to determine if people are present and paying attention that help us decide whether to serve a video ad in a Google Video Partner site or app,” he said.

According to him, Google keeps an eye on compliance with its policies and last year stopped delivering advertising to over 143,000 websites that were deemed to be breaking them.

Renaud added that the report's assertion that the majority of campaign ads are run on third-party sites rather than YouTube, saying the opposite is true.