Bing is Microsoft's search engine, and here it boasted that it successfully blocked more than 5 million cryptocurrency-related ads, after it imposed a strict marketing ban in 2018.
On its Ad quality year in review 2018 blog post, Bing explained its problems regarding spams from sketchy advertisers.
The company described it as how these people overwhelm its service with “harmful and misleading ads, persuasive content, and innocent looking URLs that lead to phishing, malware attacks, and other types of fraud."
Bing wanted to eliminate if not reduce the number of misleading ads, and as a result:
"To put it in perspective, if one person took a single second to find and take down each bad ad or scammer, it would take them nearly 30 years to remove the same number found by our automated methods in 2018."
"The high returns and volatility of cryptocurrencies invited a lot of interest from retail investors and speculators looking to make a quick return," Bing explained.
"There wasn’t much regulatory oversight, and the overall pseudo-anonymity built into currencies like bitcoin [sic] made cryptocurrency a prime target for fraudsters and scam artists to defraud end-users."
This is why, Bing said, it decided to ban cryptocurrency-related content from its advertising platform altogether in May 2018. The move came just a few months after Facebook enacted similar measures.
Google too stopped approving ads pertaining to digital assets, but in October 2018, the company relaxed those rules a but by accepting submissions only from those regulated exchanges in Japan and the U.S..
Bing in saying 5 million banned cryptocurrency-related ads is certainly a lot. But, in comparison, this 5 million was less than 1 percent of all advertisements Bing blocked in 2018.
Another type of ads Bing banned, was those that are weapon-related.
The company said that it blocked 18 million ads and 5,000 websites from its platform. They included those that promote recreational guns such as BB guns, paintball guns and air rifles, as well as integral accessories that can be attached to firearms, used to create ammunition, or aid in the reloading process.
It also blocked 12,000 "tech support scams" Bing ads. This was an increase of about 20 percent year-on-year.
Going forward, Bing on its blog post said that 2019 presents opportunities for taking its quality and protection efforts even further.
