I’m not sure if you’re suggesting that Google’s platform doesn’t provide advertisers the ability to mark specific domains which they do not want their ads to be shown on?
I believe this feature is readily available under the Placements > Exclusions page.
If an advertiser did not explicitly excluded a certain domain, it doesn’t mean an advertiser wants to place ads on that domain.
Sorry for using this analogy again, if Google banned some porn site, but an advertiser did not add that porn site to the exclusion list, likely it still means that advertiser agrees with Google moderation and don’t want to be advertised on that porn site.
Google ads has a policy for ads and for hosters (which prohibits hatred, for example), both advertisers and hosters agreed with it when they joined the Google’s service.
One might disagree with the fact that such policy exists in Google, but that’s topic for another discussion.
I think it's naive to think that they are purely doing this to protect Advertisers' convenience.
Maybe it could. I believe the market of advertising on marginal websites is small, and it's not worth the trouble for Google to try to work on that market: the number of users of these websites is small, and the number of advertisers wanting to advertise on questionable websites is also small.
> I think it's naive to think that they are purely doing this to protect Advertisers' convenience.
It's not just convenience. When advertisers are unhappy, Google loses a lot of money, because ads make the most of Google revenue.
If you have reasons to believe otherwise, please explain.
* all these websites account for at most 1% of Google Ads network reach by the number of page views
* since these websites are to be opt-in, the advertisers' competition will be much lower, probably 1/10 of the usual click price
* since the number of advertisers will be low, and only marginal advertisers would opt-in the marginal website list, the relevance of ads (and thus the probability of a click) will be also much much lower, probably 1/10 of the usual click rate
So by banning all marginal websites Google loses only 0.01% of revenue from ads network. If my back of the envelope calculations is at least order of magnitude correct, this does look like a very little price to pay for relief from a headache associated with working with questionable websites.
I've heard this a lot... but does this really cause them problems?
Advertisers are afraid of being mentioned in some viral tweet like: "Coca-cola is advertising on the website next to a comment suggesting to kill all black people. They are racist! Let's boycott Coca-cola!"
And Google has a reputation to maintain: they protect advertisers from situations like described above.
Maybe it is not a real problem for advertisers, to be advertised on the wrong website, I don't know. But I understand they don't want to have that risk for virtually no profit.
Are advertisers really choosing to "trust google to do the moderation" or is the reality that Google is a virtual monopoly and advertisers don't have much of a choice?
AFAIU Google is not yet the monopoly among the ad networks (it holds less than a half), so it’s too early to regulate.
There are advertising networks (like those used on porn sites for an extreme example) which have weaker rules, but the websites get smaller profits.