Google violated its principles in Ad contracts, research finds

About 80% of Google’s video ad placements on third-party sites violated promised standards, new research shows; Google disputes claims.

According to recent research, Google broke its own pledged standards when displaying video ads on other websites, raising concerns about the openness of the tech giant's online advertising business.

On its own website and mobile application, YouTube from Google displays advertisements. However, the business also facilitates the placement of video ads on various websites across the internet via a program called Google Video Partners. In exchange for a premium, Google guarantees that its ads will appear on reputable websites before the primary video content on the page, with the audio on, and that only skip-proof ads will be paid for by brands. 

Google breaks these rules roughly 80% of the time, according to research from Adalytics, a company that assists brands in tracking where their online ads are displayed. The company was charged with violating Google's monetization guidelines, among other things, by inserting advertisements in small, muted, automatically playing videos that are off to the side of a page's main content.

By tracking campaigns from more than 1,100 brands that received billions of ad impressions between 2020 and 2023, Adalytics was able to compile its data. The business informed reporters of its findings.

According to a statement from Google, the report made a number of untrue claims and did not accurately represent how the company protected its advertisers. The business claimed that it has stringent rules for the software used to serve video ads on external websites.