Adsense is broken
We already had trouble with scam ads on Adsense several years ago. While such rather obvious scams like the fake virus warning from 2018 seem to have disappeared, other scam ads have shown up.
Last year, a user contacted us asking to cancel their subscription - but Kittysplit doesn’t offer any subscriptions. We soon figured that the user has been scammed by a fraudulent advertisement displayed while using Kittysplit on a phone.
How the user was tricked
The scam is simple - the ad shows a huge, green START button, pretending to be part of Kittysplit. But the button takes the user to a third party site that asks for the user’s credit card details. It pretends the cost is for a service of Kittysplit (eg settling up with your friends, cost for using the site). Initially it’s free or almost free, but starts charging a monthly subscription costing anywhere between 20 and 60 €/$/£ for a service the user never wanted.
Here’s a screenshot of a deceptive ad:
As we became aware of the problem, we quickly took action and started blocking such ads in the Adsense ad review center. This seemed to solve the issue for a while, but the ads kept coming back in different variations - always a big and bright button saying START, CONTINUE, NEXT, DOWNLOAD or similar.
A few months ago, another user contacted us who had also been scammed by these ads. So we blocked the misleading ads again and again, passing many hours blocking thousands of ads and hundreds of advertiser accounts, hoping that this would solve the problem. But it just didn’t stop, and no matter how many times we blocked these ads, they came back after a few days.
Why we decided to stop serving ads in order to protect our users
But it turns out it’s impossible to catch all bad ads, and recently a third user got scammed. So we decided it’s too much and turned off all ads last month. This means Kittysplit is now ads free (woo-hoo) until we find another ad solution, or Adsense fixes the problem. We know nobody likes ads anyway, but we rely on ads revenue to keep free Kitties free for you.
While this costs us money in lost ads revenue, it’s more important to us to protect our users from being scammed by bad advertisers.
But why does it still happen?
The real question is why Adsense still allows these ads to come back. They are clearly against the Adsense policies (Misrepresentation - Misleading ad design): Ads that make it difficult for the user to understand that they are interacting with an ad are not allowed.
So why does Adsense keep serving them? The ads should be fairly simple to detect and block. Come on, it’s 2024, you’re Google and have AI and stuff. Every site owner spending countless hours blocking each ad individually every time they come back after a day or two, is clearly not a viable solution. Google/Adsense have to solve this on their side!
Google claims to use machine learning and AI to block ads. But even the most rudimentary AI in 2024 should easily be able to detect a big fat green button saying “CONTINUE”. However, the ads keep coming back.
What’s wrong, Adsense?