If you’ve ever looked into SEO or anything remotely related to SEO in terms of Google, you noticed that Google pays utmost respect to two things. The first one is algorithms and the technical side of things, followed by the ever-growing emphasis on user experience. They promote their own rules on how you should set up and optimize your website. The focus is also on the reaction your viewers and Google users have to your website, business, and offer.
A Google user is someone who enjoys having things ready on-the-go, with a busy lifestyle and a lack of time. They are very sensitive to poorly optimized pages hard to access from a number of devices, misleading, or dull content. Pretty much every ad out there can be perceived as at least somewhat misleading. One could wonder then how they fit into the whole story about excellent user experience and freedom.
Google and ads
Sales are an important part of every business. Every entity or individual trying to make money is either relying on donations or sales. Both of the models require some marketing skills. With Google, the recipe seems to be simple. You no longer have to rely on SEO purely to position yourself on SRP, you can turn to Google paid ads, as long as you respect their rules. Apart from creating an ad by the book, pay attention to how you pitch those ads, particularly referring to the content those ads stand next to. Google has deleted over 3.2 billion ads last year. This is almost double to the number of blacklisted ads in 2016 (1.7 billion ads). All of these were marked as “bad ads” due to the violation of Google’s advertising policy.
How do Cryptos fit into this context?
Cryptocurrencies are a great part of today’s online world and no one is to say where they will go from there, soon enough they could become an integral part of our everyday lives. So how can something which is steadily becoming mainstream, still remain this controversial? As a reminder, it may be good to point out that there are services, such as those of law firms, which have been banned from advertising in a number of countries for years now.
It’s not all about the acceptance and being mainstream, it’s about the number of opportunities certain services offer to scammers. Google seems to believe that the cryptocurrency market involves a lot of scams and a number of ways to mislead people through investment advice. This is why they have adjusted their advertising policy to limit the advertising a number of crypto exchanges, including financial products such as cryptocurrencies, CFDs, and binary options. This is just an addition to their already existing rules on advertising financial services, which also expanded to the forex market. The ban was introduced on 1st June 2018.
The history
Talking about the keywords such as user experience, misleading ads, and speculative products we can’t help but fit them all into the ultimate keyword – scam. The online world has seen a number of major scams in the recent period, where a number of them have affected some of the largest businesses. Facebook decided not to take more chances and introduced the ban at the beginning of the year. Google has soon after stepped out with their announcement about the ban they were about to enforce in June. Twitter and Snapchat followed the lead.
Alternative theories
We can understand that the finance industry felt largely threatened by having some of the most influential platforms turning their back on it. This particularly came as a shock seeing that most of them had, in one way or another, proclaimed the bright future of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general. The fact that people behind these platforms generally did not seem to be against cryptocurrencies, yet they have taken such a strong stand, lead some of the people from the finance industry to suspect and claim that Google and Facebook are looking into launching their own cryptocurrencies and are thus trying to make room for it by suppressing Bitcoin.
The aftermath
So how is the crypto market coping after the ban? The price of a number of altcoins is directly dependent on Bitcoin’s price. This is due to the inability to trade them directly due to the lack of appropriate trading pairs in the market. They are traded in terms of Bitcoin’s market value. This relationship, as well as the fact that Bitcoin is the first and the greatest one out there leads us to focus on Bitcoin.
Bitcoin has reached its all-time high in the second half of 2017, but it dropped significantly, picked up and started fluctuating again. This was driven by a number of policies introduced by different governments, as well as online platforms. It is not all Google’s fault. The ban was not the one who did the greatest damage to Bitcoin, but by the announcement of the ban. Those who have picked up the latest trend and invested in Bitcoin only because it was “hot” at the time, have given into the panic wave and started selling out. We could say that this has affected the value of Bitcoin in a negative way.
How is the crypto world functioning now?
If you try Googling cryptocurrencies and exchanges, you will still come across a number of search results which could eventually lead you to an exchange. A lot of crypto investing activities, particularly in terms of ICO has turned to organic marketing. This is to replace paid advertising. They are now using the word of mouth to spread information about initial coin offerings without the involvement of any ads. This means that scammers can still survive the ban. It also means that genuine exchanges get an opportunity to continue with their work, though with some extra effort.
Who knows, perhaps the ban is not a bad thing even though some see it as a catastrophe. It seems that Google is now protecting a number of inexperienced traders and impulse buyers. On the other hand, There are the exchanges which can still operate. All they have to do is implement marketing strategies but by turning to basic marketing methods. Having to invest more work into getting clients could raise the quality level and investment standards of their client base. A smaller number of scams could work wonders for their reputations.
