It's not just Youtube, it's across all of Google Ads.
We had to hire someone to review ads in Google's ad transparency center. Every day they find dozens of new domains, with the same creatives - all those fake button "Continue"/"Download" click-trick ads.
The same process every ad. Report to google, block on google, and send to a third party ad security company. The volume didn't start going down until we hired that third party ad security company to do blocking post-auction. Google continues to let the exact same creatives come through, just with different domains/ad accounts. Their models can handle this, they just choose not too.
Seeing the CPMs these scam ads pay, it must make up a big portion of a reportable revenue source for google, where blocking would hurt their numbers for the quarter.
Not just Ads either. Have you used Google Shopping? Huge number of fake websites selling stuff. During Covid when you couldn't find a bicycle for sale anywhere, Google Shopping would yield dozens of sellers with websites that were just created a few days prior with tons of bikes for sale at great prices, all a complete scam.
We had to hire someone to review ads in Google's ad transparency center. Every day they find dozens of new domains, with the same creatives - all those fake button "Continue"/"Download" click-trick ads.
The same process every ad. Report to google, block on google, and send to a third party ad security company. The volume didn't start going down until we hired that third party ad security company to do blocking post-auction. Google continues to let the exact same creatives come through, just with different domains/ad accounts. Their models can handle this, they just choose not too.
Seeing the CPMs these scam ads pay, it must make up a big portion of a reportable revenue source for google, where blocking would hurt their numbers for the quarter.