Bing blocked over five million cryptocurrency-related ads in 2018. The search engine, owned by tech giant Microsoft revealed this in its “Ad quality year in review 2018” report. The report also revealed that overall, Bing suspended over 200,000 accounts and over 900 million ads.
The lack of regulatory certainly was the key reason behind bringing down the crypto ads. According to the report, “there wasn’t much regulatory oversight, and the overall pseudo-anonymity built into currencies like Bitcoin Core made cryptocurrency a prime target for fraudsters and scam artists to defraud end-users.”
This was the reason Bing banned crypto ads and blocked the five million ads.
For the crypto community, this isn’t the first encounter with Bing. The platform, which ranks sixth in ad revenue globally, banned crypto ads in May last year. Bing followed a pattern established by other tech giants, all of whom had banned crypto-related ads. The first was Facebook back in January, with Google following suit two months later.
This was a massive blow to cryptos and denied them a huge portion of the digital ads space. Between them, Google and Facebook control over 60 percent of the digital ads space.
However, months later, Google and Facebook had a change of heart and lifted the bans. Facebook was first, readmitting crypto ads in June, six months after the ban. However, the advertisers had to be pre-approved by the company. Google followed suit in September, but only for regulated firms.
While the companies have been anti-crypto, some of their leaders have been the biggest crypto bulls. By far the biggest crypto bull leading a tech giant is Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey. Jack has long held the belief that cryptos will take over in the near future as they are superior to current financial systems. He has also been amassing cryptos on a weekly basis.
However, despite vouching for cryptos every so often, his platform banned crypto ads last year. Twitter banned crypto ads in the same month as Google, citing the increased crypto fraud as the key reason. Interestingly, Twitter still allowed crypto ads from wallets and exchanges developed by public companies that list on major stock exchanges. One of these publicly listed companies that offer crypto services is Square, a company that Jack Dorsey happens to be the CEO of. Coincidence?
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