I have reported so many of those dodgy, scammy, sexualized ads on YouTube, that YouTube/Google has removed the option to report advertisements from my account.

They don't care as long as they're getting paid and there's no immediate liability for them.

Then there's the profits from scams, Meta is the only one with the stones to admit they like scam ads because they make up 10% of their revenue. I doubt it's a massive coincidence all the other big platforms are overrun with scams they do as little as possible to police.

https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...

Adding friction to the process (on the advertiser side) means less money for Google: 1) due to the cost of implementing the checking, 2) because some legitimate advertisers will be falsely denied, 3) because the scam ads were still paying money.

Not adding the friction doesn't seem to come with any serious downside. One would expect that it would, e.g. due to publishers removing the most profitable properties from the ad network or governments legislating this out of existence, but that doesn't seem to happen.

So, given these incentives, the outcome is inevitable.

If Google had to pay a massive fine for every scam ad that gets through, or was liable for the damages the ads cause, etc. - or otherwise had a strong incentive - suddenly there would be enough resources to make sure every ad is reviewed, advertisers that push scam ads get fully banned on the first offense rather than being given second, third, and fourth chances, etc.

The "more than can be reviewed" might have been a logical conclusion in a purely human based workflow, even if you have the lowest cost per head click workers in like, an external contractor call centre type environment in Bangladesh.

As the author points out, the ordinary consumer class version of publicly available Gemini very accurately classifies the ad as malicious. I really doubt that there are THAT MANY unique new ads being submitted per day that they can't afford the compute to run them through a similar classifier.

They have literally destroyed their own reputation, and all the reputations of legitimate products that might appear along these scams. Do you think anyone would want their car, smartphone, or tax software appear next to actual credit card scams?

TV has standards for decency, and factuality, and might ban entire categories of ads (financial services) altogether.

I would say it's just because there's no incentive to do anything unless a huge media storm breaks out or something.

turning a blind eye to this stuff probably makes them good money

Is it enough? Probably not, based on this article. Are their policies strict enough? IMHO no way, considering Youtube left an ad up for "Ukranian women" in the early years of the war which wtf. But they certainly do try.

Like most businesses, the actual people involved are also well-intentioned, at least in the abstract; they wanted to make ads that sell products without annoying people. Obviously there's material conditions beneath and around all that, but we don't need to explain that part here ;)

If only there was a technology which could automate this... But we all know, AI is only used on users, not customers - and users get the two line perl script "AI" which says "We have reviewed your claim and decided to ignore it".

In any other normal market, the middleman would be held accountable. Big tech? Not so much. We seen the slap on the wrist regarding Microsoft at the start of the century/millennium. We can also witness the same with regards to the garbage coming from China, where China doesn't take responsibility. Learned from the best.