I wonder if all these crypto projects still attract fresh money. Or if it's largely winners of the Bitcoin boom shifting their assets around.
Google will ban all cryptocurrency-related advertising
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Re: Google will ban all cryptocurrency-related advertising
#32Google is a private business and they can do what they want, but this disappoints me. More and more Google seems to be thinking of themselves as content police (consider YouTube is owned by Google also), and I think that's a shame. Perhaps it will open up a market for dethroning them. A serious YouTube competitor that doesn't demonetize content they find disagreeable would be very healthy, IMHO.
> Google is a private business and they can do what they want
It's exactly this line of thinking that got us here. This 'private business' is a lot of people doing the same thing (in this case censoring things, as much as I hate ads, this is censorship). But people who use their products can't organize themselves in this way (they are not a single entity) and can't boycott them when shit like that happens. They can't leave independently either since it puts each of them them at a disadvantage ("everyone else is using it").
That's why Google must be slapped as hard as possible here - because they are nearly a monopoly.
Re: Google will ban all cryptocurrency-related advertising
#33Google is a private business and they can do what they want, but this disappoints me. More and more Google seems to be thinking of themselves as content police (consider YouTube is owned by Google also), and I think that's a shame. Perhaps it will open up a market for dethroning them. A serious YouTube competitor that doesn't demonetize content they find disagreeable would be very healthy, IMHO.
> A serious YouTube competitor that doesn't demonetize content they find disagreeable would be very healthy, IMHO.
It's probably not YouTube demonitizing content that they personally find disagreeable. It's most likely advertisers that find it disagreeable that their ads show up next to objectionable content: advertisers don't control precisely which videos their ads show up next to - they just target them to certain types of content. So advertisers need to have confidence in Google's decisions that ad-enabled content is reasonably appropriate for them. Instead, advertisers will threaten to pull their ads from Google's platforms entirely if it doesn't self-police adequately in terms of deciding which content is allowed on the platform and ad-enabled.
That was really the controversy with Logan Paul. He had top-tier status with YouTube (Google Preferred) meaning that YouTube positioned his channel as suitable for advertising from the biggest, most risk-averse brands, and those brands flipped out about the potential of appearing before his suicide forest video. See https://variety.com/2018/digital/news/youtube-changes-partne...
> In addition, YouTube said all videos in Google Preferred — representing the top 5% most-viewed channels — will be reviewed by human moderators before they’re monetized. YouTube also is rolling out a three-tiered “suitability system” for advertisers to select their level of comfort with content they’re buying ads against.
If advertisers were generally happy to have their content show up alongside any sort of videos, then YouTube might as well. There's another aspect of this which is YouTube kicking content off their platform that isn't even monetized at all, but that probably relates to the same problem again, where advertisers wouldn't want to monetize on a platform that's known for hosting objectionable content generally. (Porn sites don't tend to run a lot of mainstream ads, for example.)
Note that this description is intended to be a positive analysis of Google's probable behavior, not a normative defense of it. From a free speech perspective it's unfortunate that so many content policies are ultimately advertising-driven, but advertisers are the ones paying for most of the platform (with the exception of subscribers like to YouTube Red which are probably a minority of users).
Re: Google will ban all cryptocurrency-related advertising
#34I wonder if all these crypto projects still attract fresh money. Or if it's largely winners of the Bitcoin boom shifting their assets around.
I suspect that a good chunk of the crypto projects are simply money laundering fronts. Buy crypto with undocumented cash, create ICO, buy into it with your own undocumented crypto, and take the cash from the ICO as something the IRS believes you have the legitimate right to spend.
I have no proof of this, of course, but it's an obvious money laundering route. Costs are fairly minimal to generate a legitimate-sounding reason to have a bunch of crypto.
Re: Google will ban all cryptocurrency-related advertising
#35Google is a private business and they can do what they want, but this disappoints me. More and more Google seems to be thinking of themselves as content police (consider YouTube is owned by Google also), and I think that's a shame. Perhaps it will open up a market for dethroning them. A serious YouTube competitor that doesn't demonetize content they find disagreeable would be very healthy, IMHO.
With the ICO/coin ads promising 49,000% returns that I see here in the UK, I’m glad that they’re putting the brakes on it.
I'm pretty sure this is not a "political" decision, but just a recommendation their lawyers suggested to avoid being dragged into the (unavoidable) litigations that will spring up now that people wake up and realize they have been scammed. Google doesn't want to be nowhere near when the shit hits the fan.
Re: Google will ban all cryptocurrency-related advertising
#36I wonder what kind of effect, if any, do advertising platforms have on success of an ICO? My understanding is that most of the demand is driven through Discord and Youtube channels, Reddit and maybe BitcoinTalk. Happy to be corrected on this.
Envion ran a very large Facebook campaign and they finished with a 100M funding round. I'd say it has a substantial effect.
Re: Google will ban all cryptocurrency-related advertising
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not consenting adults if it's a scam, and Google can't analyze every ad to check for that. In a space where most ads are scams, this looks legit to me.
It's their business, they should be allowed to decide whatever they want. In the same way we can think that most of the businesses are scams, because most of them end up bankrupt after 5 years. Should they also ban the ads for products of companies younger than 5 years? To protect the consumers from becoming bag holders of unsupported and unusable products?
Do you realize the difference between buying a service or product, and investing in a company (or ICO)?
Re: Google will ban all cryptocurrency-related advertising
#38I'd be quite stoked were Facebook to ban most but not all cryptocurrency ads.
What I find most disturbing are all the self-appointed "experts" who offer classes in which they will teach their "system" that they claim will guarantee the students collossal returns on very small investments.
However there are lots of ads that I'd like Facebook to keep. Many of the ICO (Initial Coin Offering) ads are from legitimate startup companies who hope to finance their new businesses by selling tokens at a fixed price for a limited period of time.
But I only want just the _legitimate_ ICO ads to remain. Unfortunately there are plenty of ICO scams. It can be quite difficult for a newbie to determine the difference.
I had a good experience with my first ICO - I bought NAGA at $1.00 then after it was listed with an exchange, I sold it at $3.00.
I have three other ICOs that I plan to hold until the companies behind them become profitable.
Note: "sold". I have a special hatred for the word "HODL".
There are other kinds of crypto advertising that I feel should remain. I'm very happy with my Bitmain Antminer L3+ LiteCoin mining rig.
Even with mining rigs there are scams: Etherium and Monero are both "ASIC resistant" because mining them requires quite a lot of memory. They both require GPUs.
In principle ASIC ETH or Monero ASIC mining is _possible_. I expect someone will eventually make ASICs with the required memory integrated into the chip.
But there are _no_ ETH or Monero ASIC rigs _yet_. Despite this, scammers are endlessly posting on message boards that their "company" - perhaps "shell company" is a better term - has ASIC Etherium rigs for sale.
Re: Google will ban all cryptocurrency-related advertising
#39Google is a private business and they can do what they want, but this disappoints me. More and more Google seems to be thinking of themselves as content police (consider YouTube is owned by Google also), and I think that's a shame. Perhaps it will open up a market for dethroning them. A serious YouTube competitor that doesn't demonetize content they find disagreeable would be very healthy, IMHO.
They're stopping ads, not content. Content and ads are very different things. Stopping lucrative crypto ads certainly will financially hurt Google, but is definitely a win for consumers. Most crypto advertising is 100% scams. There's a huge difference between letting someone speak their mind on your platform (content) versus accepting money to broadcast their message on your platform (ads). As for content, that's com…
Not the full story. They've been actually demonetizing, or in some cases removing, videos for political speech they don't agree with.
Even former Rep Ron Paul's Youtube channel was demonetized--which is frankly just insanely ridiculous.
Meanwhile media reports extremist content such as Nazi propaganda is available?!
Another example is anti-Trump, conservative commentator Ben Shapiro.
I'm not exactly sure who can be said is being "protected" by retaliating against Paul and Shapiro?
It's their platform, but without either competition or regulation they're quickly becoming an unreasonable Thought Police.
1-https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/xw5bxk/youtube-ne...
Re: Google will ban all cryptocurrency-related advertising
#40At first I expected this to be about JS-mining ads. How the hell can these companies turn blind eyes to bogus advertising like [1] to the point that the FTC steps in - but suddenly have a conscience about cryptocurrency. It would please me to no end for advertising to magically become 100% truthful and fact-based. But this is selective censorship for reasons I don't care to understand, the ads these companies serve w…
Is/was Google serving "one weird trick" advertisements? Or is that other ad networks?