“Ethereum” Blacklisted By Google As A Google Ad Keyword

Google has had a complicated love-hate relationship with cryptocurrency especially pertaining to advertisements. It exercised an unexplained ban in July 2018, later in September 2018, cryptocurrency advertisements were allowed in U.S. and Japan. According to recent reports, Google has now blacklisted  ‘Ethereum’ keyword on their platform Google Ads.

Decenter, a developers team doing smart contract security audits originally reported this ban on Twitter.

We are seeing a hard stop on Google Ads containing "Ethereum" as the keyword in the last two days. Is anyone else noticing the same change? Where there any new policy changes introduced @GoogleAds? #ethereum pic.twitter.com/P5XMGphdiV

— Decenter (@DecenterTeam) January 10, 2019

Advertisers may promote cryptocurrency exchanges that target the United States and Japan. Hence, you may not be able to run ads which target other countries. Hope this helps. 

Hey, Chetan. We're actually a developers team doing smart contract security audits so we're seeing this error for keywords such as "ethereum security audits" and "ethereum development services". Would you say that this is expected behaviour or can we fix it some way? Thanks.

— Decenter (@DecenterTeam) January 10, 2019

The Decanter team that reverted explaining their position in regards to the usage of keyword ‘Ethereum’ and asked if “this is expected behavior or can we fix it some way?”

Google ads replied to this with a did you read the policy card statement.

‘Although we wouldn’t be able to preemptively confirm if your keyword is eligible to trigger ads, we’d recommend that you refer to the ‘Cryptocurrencies’ section of our policy on Financial products and services’

Obviously, cryptocurrency enthusiasts did not appreciate Google’s action. They claimed that the search engine has lost its neutrality, on a subreddit for this event. User, ThePlague won the top spot in the discussion with a red-hot stream of thought against the corporation.

‘Google has various political and economic agendas, and they are quite willing to use their various services to promote their preferences. AdSense and Youtube are notorious for this, but there have been some incidents regarding the play store as well. Despite their supposed corporate “do no evil” motto, they are more than willing to use their considerable power to choose winners and losers in social, political, and economic matters.’

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