Did ‘Ethereum’ Just Get Banned As a Google Ad Keyword?

A smart contract auditing startup Decenter recently tweeted that Google (Alphabet Inc.) has allegedly blacklisted keywords that have Ethereum (ETH) in it, on its advertising platform Google Ads.

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

This comes as a slightly bold and bizarre stance on Google’s part, who have in the past maintained a bittersweet relationship with cryptocurrencies. However, considering Google’s prompt redressal mechanism and public relations, a tweet from the official Google Ads account was soon noticed on the thread.

Hi there, thanks for reaching out. 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. Do let us know if you have any additional questions. -Chetan

— Google Ads (@GoogleAds) January 10, 2019

Decenter further explained the nature of their company and the specific problem that they were facing. So Decenter is basically a group of developers who specialize in smart contract security audits. So when they were trying to use keywords like “ethereum development services” and “ethereum security audits” an error message would pop up.

Google Ads replied to this and said:

“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.”

Decenter then took the debate to one of the most popular forums for any and all things crypto, Reddit. They asked the Reddit community about this issue and Google Ads team replied there saying:

“Any of the keywords that contain “ethereum” in our campaigns are no longer showing ads as of January 9th and are now reporting the following error.”

One Reddit user crticized this stance of Google and said:

“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.”

While this is not untrue, we might be getting ahead of ourselves here. Google does have its self interests to cater to and this action could be an outcome of that. However, I personally feel it will be wrong to accuse Google of shutting their doors to crypto just yet.

This ad fiasco also comes at a time when Former Google CEO went on record to say that he believes Ethereum holds Great Potential. Google is expected to keep a more open mind towards cryptocurrencies in the future so we sincerely hope that this issue will be dealt with soon.