Google Ready to Cut Off Ad Revenue of Pirate Sites

By: Ali Raza  |   July 21st, 2013   |   Business, Google, News

Back in May, Google came up with a proposal that it would deprive pirate sites of ad revenue in order to hit them where it hurts the most: their wallets. Now The Guardian has reported that Google has decided to act on this proposal. Here is an excerpt from The Guardian’s report:

 

“Websites offering pirated content will be blocked from offering adverts from Google and other big web advertisers, in a US scheme intended to strangle illicit revenues. The initiative will mean copyright holders from the music, film and other creative industries will be able to alert the big ad networks if their ads are appearing on sites offering links to pirated content or counterfeit goods …”

 

Mentioning the reason behind depriving the pirate websites from ad revenue, Google had previously said that if it blocks such sites from its search results it would not prove useful, as new sites with the same content would start to pop up on everyday basis and its entire practice would go to waste. Therefore, Google believes that the best solution to deal with pirated sites is to chop off their revenue source which in most cases is advertising.

 

Quoting the examples in this case, The Guardian reported that The Pirate Bay site gets £65,000 or $100,000 for each month to run casino advertisements, while the earning of Surfthechannel from ads is only is £35,000 or $53,000 for each month. Therefore, Google has made it known that by allowing copyright owners to report its ads on pirate sites would tremendously help the company to take proactive actions against such sites by identifying them.

 

Google’s vice president of public policy and government relations, Susan Molinari, said that, “In 2012, we disabled ad serving to 46,000 sites for violating our policies on copyright infringing content, and shut down more than 82,000 accounts for attempting to advertise counterfeit goods. Nearly 99% of our account suspensions were discovered through our own detection efforts and risk models.”

 

Google’s proposal to bring down the revenue of pirate sites sounds practical, as it will surely damage the pockets of such sites. However, it remains to be seen whether this new model from Google will prove a killer for pirate sites or they may come up with a better plan to defy this move by the search engine giant. It is anticipated we would not have to wait too long to get the answer for this question.

 

Source: 9to5Google