A new report claims that Google violated its own standards when placing video ads on other sites. Google runs video ads on YouTube and third-party sites via Google Video Partners (GVP).
About 80% of ads that went to Google video partner websites were found on sites that were serving video ads in muted, auto-playing, obscured, or out-streamed video slots, according to ad research firm Adalytics. The organization’s stated objective is to show empirically that the current system of consumer data collection and ad-targeting needs to be re-evaluated.
The misalignment may have cost advertisers billions of digital ad dollars, according to the report. The finding also highlights how opaque the online ad business can be.
How advertisers may have been misled by YouTube video ads
Google runs an ad service called TrueView, through which advertisers only pay for actual views their ads rather than impressions. TrueView asks users if they want to skip the video ad after five seconds with a visual prompt. Google’s policies state that TrueView ads must be skippable and audible, and they must not be initiated by passive user scrolling.
But the report found that, since 2020, a significant portion of TrueView skippable in-stream ads appear to have been served on hundreds of thousands of websites and apps that didn’t meet Google’s stated quality standards.
The ads, for instance, were placed in small video players in the corner or on the side of the device viewport, were in a fully muted video player, or appeared via auto-play without any viewer interaction, the report found.
Adalytics shared examples of these types of ad placements with advertisers, and the firm reports that several dozen marketers said they would not have bought TrueView ads that run on third-party sites if this was clearly explained prior to the campaigns.
Airbnb and the European Parliament are some of the organizations misled by Google’s YouTube video ads
A host of companies including Airbnb, Best Buy, Chick-fil-A, as well as the US federal government and European Parliament, are just some of the organizations that may have been misled about Google’s YouTube video ads. Youtube makes up 8.3% of US digital-video ad spending, according to research firm Inside Intelligence, as cited by the Wall Street Journal.
In a blog post published June 27, Google said that Adalytics’s findings “used unreliable sampling and proxy methodologies and made extremely inaccurate claims about the Google Video Partner (GVP) network.” The company said that the “overwhelming majority” of video ad campaigns are served on YouTube, despite the report’s findings to the contrary, and that advertisers have the option to opt out of their ads running on third-party sites via GVP.
In addition, Google said in the post that it has strict policies against publishers engaging in deceptive ad-serving practices. In 2022, the company said it stopped serving ads on more than 143,000 sites for violating its policies.