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.
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.