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Where Facebook goes… Google follows.

Apparently Google will ban online advertisements promoting cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings starting in June this year, part of a broader crackdown on the marketing of a new breed of high-risk financial products. Alphabet Inc.’s Google announced the decision Wednesday night in an update to its policy, which says it will begin to block ads for “cryptocurrencies and related content.” Facebook Inc. took a similar step in January, leaving the two largest web-ad sellers out of reach of the nascent digital-currency sector.

Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market value, pared an advance of about 2% after Google’s announcement, trading little changed at $9,099 as of 1:04 p.m. in Hong Kong. Rival coins Ripple and Ether also pared gains. The internet-search giant is also restricting ads for financial products including binary options, a risky derivative with an all-or-nothing payoff. Right now, Google queries for terms like “binary options” and “buy bitcoin” produce four ads at the top of the results. After Facebook banned ads for cryptocurrencies in January some aggressive businesses found a loophole: purposely misspelling words like “bitcoin” in their ads. A Google spokeswoman said the company’s policies will try to anticipate workarounds like this. Google’s updated policy came with the release of its annual “bad ads” report, a review of the number of malicious, deceptive and controversial ads Google scrubs from its massive search, display and video network. In 2017, Google said it removed more than 3.2 billion advertisements from the web. That’s doubled from 1.7 billion in 2016.

 

Whilst on the face of it this seems like shooting themselves in the foot Google trawled more than $95 billion in revenue just last year alone. Not bad if you can get it. We can’t see it stopping the rise of the Crypto although it might put off the smaller chancer out for a quick rip before dissolving back into the matrix. With now somewhere in the region of almost 1700 crypto currencies it is an alarming rate at which they grow but a recent conference we attended in Gibraltar heard with one voice from the speakers that crypto is here to stay however some regulation must be made in order to stop those “cowboys” out there.