All is well for cryptocurrency on the world’s most popular search engine, Google. Today, in a sudden volte-face, browser giant Google has proposed that cryptocurrency advertisements will once again make an appearance on the search engine’s results pages. The advertisements will not start immediately but are likely to reappear by October of this year.
However, such ad-spots will be held to specific regulations – only regulated crypto exchanges can purchase such display-space from Google Ads. Additionally, such ads will only play in two specific market regions –Japan and the United States.
According to CNBC reports the latest announcement will bring to a close the sudden knee-jerk ban Alphabet Inc-owned Google Ads imposed on cryptocurrency advertising in March, earlier this year. According to Scott Spencer from Google, the ban was an “extreme caution” to protect consumers.
While the blanket-ban by Google on decentralized currencies was criticized by the majority, Google had technical and legal issues that pressured it into rolling out such a ban in March 2018.
Though the ban came into effect in June, the main goal of the ban appears to have been preventive and consumer-protectionist in nature. One of the many reasons for such an imposition was the sudden glut of cryptocurrency offers luring investors into making speculative investments. ICOs or wallets and similar issues appeared at an uncontrollable pace, especially through lucrative advertisements. But many of these offerings turned out to be opportunists, taking advantage of investors curious about Bitcoin.
By the end of the month of June, other social media giants – Facebook, Snapchat, and even Twitter had also issued crypto-ad bans.
The fresh policy update favoring the decentralized currency advertisements by Google is similar to Facebook’s own pre-approved crypto advertisements.
Google Ads is the mainstream revenue-earner for the search engine giant, clocking as much as $54 billion in the just the first six months of this year. Hence, the parent company Alphabet Inc remains very sensitive to issues such as an ad-ban. This is demonstrated very well in its latest update to “regulated” crypto exchange-bought ad spaces!