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Advertisers are suspending ads on YouTube
A recent investigation by the Times found adverts were appearing alongside content from supporters of extremist groups, making them around £6 per 1,000 viewers, as well as making money for the company.
Ministers have summoned Google for talks at the Cabinet Office after imposing a temporary restriction on its own ads - including for military recruitment and blood donation campaigns - appearing on YouTube.
An investigation by The Times found ads for dozens of leading firms have been shown alongside videos posted by extremists including David Duke, former leader of the Klu Klux Klan.
Numerous other racists, holocaust deniers and rape apologists have received payouts from Google for YouTube commercials.
Taxpayer-funded ads for various branches of the British Government were appearing alongside Isis propaganda videos and other offensive content.
Sky, Barclays and Vodafone are understood to be considering whether to cancel their campaigns unless Google is able to resolve the problem rapidly.
Michael Roth, the chief executive of Interpublic, one of the world’s biggest advertising groups, said on Monday that while his company had not yet frozen its spending with Google it had threatened to do so unless the technology group moved quickly to correct the problem.
“If they can’t fix it then we are not going to participate. They will suffer economically,” Mr Roth told the Financial Times.
Extremists made £250,000 from ads for UK brands on Google, say experts
Wagdi Ghoneim, an Egyptian-Qatari Salafi Muslim preacher who has been banned from entering the UK due to concerns he is seeking to “provoke others to commit terrorist acts”, is estimated to have made $78,000 from adverts placed in anti-western propaganda videos.
Other online extremists making money from adverts placed against their YouTube videos include the US pastor Steven Anderson, who was banned from the UK last year after he said the massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, was “good news” as “there’s 50 less paedophiles in the world”.
Anderson’s YouTube channel is estimated to have made $68,000 from 33.5m views of his videos, in which he says gay people “were not born that way, but they will burn that way”. Adverts that have appeared alongside Anderson’s videos include those for L’Oréal, Transport for London, Sainsbury’s, Nissan and the Guardian.
The decision of large UK advertisers to pull their business from Google's ad platforms may hit the firm's growth, according to one analyst.
Brian Wieser, an analyst at research company Pivotal, downgraded his target share price for Google owner Alphabet from $970 to $950 following the advertiser boycott.
downgraded his target share price for Google owner Alphabet from $970 to $950
We know advertisers don't want their ads next to content that doesn’t align with their values. So starting today, we’re taking a tougher stance on hateful, offensive and derogatory content. This includes removing ads more effectively from content that is attacking or harassing people based on their race, religion, gender or similar categories. This change will enable us to take action, where appropriate, on a larger set of ads and sites.
We'll be hiring significant numbers of people and developing new tools powered by our latest advancements in AI and machine learning to increase our capacity to review questionable content for advertising. In cases where advertisers find their ads were served where they shouldn’t have been, we plan to offer a new escalation path to make it easier for them to raise issues. In addition, we’ll soon be able to resolve these cases in less than a few hours.Expanded safeguards for advertisers [blog.google]
Extremists made £250,000 from ads for UK brands on Google, say experts
Did you know that Lexus marketing money has wound up in the hands of a bestiality video website? I certainly didn't either, and it's a sure bet that Toyota Motor Company, which owns the Lexus brand, didn't mean that to happen. But it's just one striking example of how multinational companies help fund the web's darker side.
Mr Buckland then drew attention to a provision in the Terrorism Act 2006, which “creates an offence of the dissemination of terrorist material either intentionally – I wouldn’t say the social media platforms are doing it intentionally – but there is an offence of recklessly disseminating this material, and I think the criminal law is there as a clear boundary beyond which people should not stray”.
Later in the hearing, Ms Cooper asked the Government to clarify whether Google was breaking the law.
Mr Buckland replied: “I think I would have to be careful because one would need to look at the evidence in a particular instance.
“But I made my point, I think the law is there, it’s a clear boundary and, frankly, if this behaviour meets the criteria for recklessness, then it potentially could lead to an investigation.
It is still a bit unrealistic to demand perfection in life but that is just my opinion.
So it is impossible to attribute this largely trivial news story (that came out yesterday) to today's price drop.
AT&T, Verizon, Enterprise and the US operations of GlaxoSmithKline have pulled millions of dollars of advertising.
While Google switched off advertising around extremist videos in Europe, it appears not to have done so in the US, said BBC North America Technology Correspondent, Dave Lee.
"There's a lot of frustration that many of the measures Google perhaps took in Europe, where the PR controversy was stepping up, didn't seem to apply to those same videos in other markets," he told Wake up to Money.
