> That would make Google responsible for the work of police - you're saying that Google should be actively trying to identify "criminals" (by whatever definitnion of whatever state in US or even their legal departmeny - quotes deliberate) and prevent them from being able to do business in modern web world.
Google is a company that nets 60 billion $ a year in profits. They can afford hiring a few thousand people to manually vet ads before they go out, and they should.
What do you think the number of different ads being displayed is, given how much each ad costs?
Estimates suggest it's about 30 billion ad impressions per day to earn that.
If each distinct ad gets 1000 impressions, that's 10 billion ads to review per year.
Let's be super generous, and assume it's 10k impressions, leaving us with 1 billion ads to review.
Let's further assume it's 1 minute per ad to review them, because people are super good at it. This will take 694440 person/days to review.
So to even give a 24 hour turnaround time, they'd have to hire 694,000 people.
If they pay them 65k each (yearly minimum wage in california), that's 45 billion a year.
This again, assumes we have ads with lots of impressions, it's only a minute per ad, and that we are okay with 24 hour turnaround time. Otherwise, it costs more.
It's really easy for people to play the "company makes x, they can afford y" game, but without real data it's sort of magical thinking.
I doubt humans could easily keep up with the review load here, at scale, at any reasonable cost/living wage.
Sure.
I"m pointing out this simple sort of "they can easily afford to do x" is usually nonsense.
I haven't commented at all on what the result should be (not allowed to do it or whatever), simply that the math that it would be simple to fix is wrong.
If we are going to argue about things in a useful way, we should avoid random assertions without data that don't really advance the argument, especially when they are trivially wrong?
Ah, i see we've moved onto ad-hominen attacks and dismissal rather than engaging for real.
That certainly may feel good, but it changes nothing about the argument?
This sort of dismissal based on who you work for is both childish, and unproductive to a real discussion. Similar to the "most fanboyish thing ever" comment, which, honestly, if telling someone their totally unsourced math and claim is wrong, by providing data and real math, is the most fanboyish thing you've ever seen, then i think you are very lucky in what you see ;)
Beyond that, i'll repeat what I said - i simply pointed out the assertion and math is wrong. That is all. You are the one claiming i am defending anything, beyond that, at all. I was very careful about not defending anything, and in fact said i'm open to all sorts of views about what to do about it.
Maybe you should re-read what i wrote, and point out any point where i did anything but show that the claim made was wrong, and the math was wrong?
Your math is wrong because you say that Google spends 0 dollars at the moment to fight scam ads.
If it is true, then Google execs should be in jail right now.
And proves point again that Google does not care about filtering content and it is profitable to accept money from criminals.
Ofcourse if your paycheck depends of criminals money then it is very dumb to share that profit to hire more people to fight malware content.
In my country there are many Google scam ads which feature local celebrities/doctors, but it is impossible to remove those ads, because Google never removes them. Zero response from Google. Even Police cannot help because nobody from Google responses.
So I guess it is intentional to spread those spam ads.
Even if users report those ads, Google 99% of time never takes an action to remove spam ads.
With few thousand people you can remove those reported ads...
So what? If Google is only profitable because the vast externalized costs to it are borne by society at large (e.g. malvertising, scams, unsafe "medical" products and supplements, competitors placing ads in an unfair way [1]), then maybe prices for advertising have to rise to match the prevention cost, or Google has to figure out other ways of staying profitable. I don't care all that much.
And if it leads to less, but higher quality ads in the end, even better.
The so what is that the comment is completely and totally wrong in it's estimation of how simple or not it would be.
That is all.
We should decide what to do about it based on correct data and sane assumptions, not random assertions that are off by orders of magnitude and backed by no data.
Google is a company that nets 60 billion $ a year in profits. They can afford hiring a few thousand people to manually vet ads before they go out, and they should.