This is just lip service
"By running an endless stream of auto-playing YouTube videos with in-stream ads (while users were not at their computers), we were able to ensure advertisers didn't have any budget left for the other parts of the web, where seedy operations might be." explained Google ad quality & security team expert Freddie McClick
I disagree. It's not lip service at all, but it isn't done out of the goodness of their hearts either.
Google invest pretty heavily in this. They have to. If advertisers don't have confidence in the ad eco system then bids drop. Google want advertisers to bid harder in their system than anywhere else. That means that they need to have more confidence that Google impressions are real than they do elsewhere. Google invest in this because it would be an awful business decision for them not to.
The other aspect here is it doesn't hurt Google to over-scrub the rest of the web in terms of not counting potential accidental clicks, as ultimately that just shifts more of the ad revenue onto Google.com & YouTube.com where Google gets a higher revenue share.
If they had much competition on the distributed ad network front they'd need to produce stronger yields, but they had such a big lead over most of the rest of the market that they were able to let it slide quite a bit and still be ahead by a long shot.
Google doesn't probably* work as hard at scrubbing accidental clicks on their own site as they do on partner sites.
http://adage.com/article/digital/search-ad-click-fraud-scheme-cost-business-2-3-million/307933/A Texas jury last week ordered TriMax Media, a digital advertising agency specializing in search engine marketing, to pay one of its competitors $2.3 million for what jurors agreed was an elaborate click-fraud scam.
...
"This was about finding the truth about activities that happen across the industry and putting an end to it," Mr. Hall said. "We had to get help from a lot of third parties like Google, Verizon and AT&T so we could connect all the dots. One of the reasons this type of activity goes on in this industry is people think they are anonymous and can't be tracked online."
So, apparently, the data Google gave them was good enough to be worth a multi-million dollar court judgment BUT not good enough for Google to discount automatically directly.
* probably, as in ... almost certainly. I remember when a Flash site had a weird set up where it didn't allow clicks back to the referrer & that AdWords campaign took all of a day to get paused until that error was corrected. Then for that same Flash-driven site, when Google shifted to enhanced AdWords campaign user experience was far less important. An advertiser with a Flash-only site had mobile ads turned off & they were automatically turned on for them, even though the searcher would land on nothing but a blank white page for $5 or $6 a click.
Get enhanced, it pays TM
https://soundcloud.com/joesmith84/google-adwords-enhanced
