Business News – Jan 23, 2025

1 - Google changes Ad Rules, Charities Pay the Price

"When Google Altered Its Ad Rules, Charities Paid the Price" refers to changes Google made to its advertising policies that inadvertently made it more difficult and expensive for charitable organizations to promote their causes online.

Understanding the Impact:

• Policy Changes: In July 2023, Google updated its advertising policies, allowing more entities to use third-party trademarks in their search ads. This change was intended to comply with the European Union's Digital Services Act.

• Increased Competition: As a result, search engines like Info.com and Ask.com began bidding on keywords related to well-known charities. For example, when someone searched for "St. Jude Children's Research Hospital," ads from these search engines appeared, directing users to their own pages instead of the charity's official site.

• Higher Advertising Costs: Charities found themselves competing against these entities for their own names and trademarks. To ensure their official websites appeared prominently in search results, they had to increase their advertising spending. Some organizations reported spending significantly more on ads than in previous years, straining their budgets.

Why It Matters:

These policy changes meant that charities, which often operate with limited funds, had to allocate more money to advertising to maintain their online visibility. This shift diverted resources away from their primary missions and services, highlighting the unintended consequences of policy decisions by major tech companies on nonprofit organizations.

2 - When Google Altered Its Ad Rules, Charities Paid the Price

New York Times. January 21, 2025.

In July 2023, Google said it would no longer restrict advertisers from using trademarks that belong to other organizations.

That change quickly became a headache for nonprofits that buy Google search ads to find donors. Other outfits, they discovered, were using their trademarks in order to draw internet traffic.

Samaritan’s Purse, a nonprofit that aids victims of natural disasters, found itself with new competition in the split-second auctions that determine which ads appear atop Google search results. St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital competed with obscure search engines eager to bring more users to their sites. And misleading ads about U.N.H.C.R., the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, proliferated on Google’s search results, according to data from SpyFu and Semrush, two sites that track digital ads.

The pattern illustrated the unintended effects of Google’s policy changes and how obscure changes made to its advertising rules can have outsize repercussions on groups dependent on the world’s biggest search engine. In this case, nonprofits were forced to compete with companies that could better afford Google’s ad rates.

The conflict also cuts to the heart of concerns by regulators around the world that Google has simply grown too powerful. The company was ruled to be an illegal monopoly in search last year. By August, a federal judge will decide what changes it must make to foster a more competitive search market. In a separate case, a federal judge is expected to rule soon on whether Google violated antitrust law with a monopoly in advertising technology, the types of tools that place ads across the web.

Google said it made the policy change on trademarks as part of its effort to comply with Europe’s Digital Services Act, a multipronged law that requires tech companies to police their platforms more aggressively and stop ads that are targeted to users based on their identity.

A Google spokesperson said that competing search engines are allowed to run ads that take users to their sites, but the ads cannot be misleading or deceptive.

“To ensure things are clear for users, all ads on search are prominently labeled, display the advertiser’s website, and must indicate if they lead to another search engine,” the spokesperson

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Episode 3904 - Jan 24 - Tiếng Anh - Tin Kinh doanh – Ngày 23 tháng 1, 2025 - Vina Technology at AI time