 Hello, and welcome to another video from the Webmaster Conference Lightning Talk series, a video series which brings you shortened but still information-packed talks we normally deliver at Webmaster conferences around the world. In this video, we'll cover a topic that's not directly related to Google Search, but which is often interesting to publishers. I will share with you why we at Google Trust and Safety create and enforce publisher policies and how that helps to protect the digital advertising ecosystem. Hi, I'm John, and I lead our outreach efforts representing the publisher policy team. Before we begin, I'd like to provide some background on the team I work with, the trust and safety team. This group creates and enforces policies, influences product excellence, identifies abuse patterns, and strives to increase safety and trust for the entire digital advertising ecosystem. To us, success looks like this. All are treated equally and find value in their interactions with Google. We try to strike a balance, help publishers earn revenue, and help advertisers distribute their messaging. But this is difficult. To be successful, we have to be good at this balancing act. With enforcement, sometimes advertisers may think that we don't go far enough. While publishers may think we go too far, when we create these policies, we must keep the needs of the entire industry in mind. We constantly review our policies and our enforcement to be fair and thorough while being mindful of societal changes and newsworthy global events. With content policies, strengthening our controls on what content publishers can monetize initially can seem like we're punishing publishers while benefiting advertisers. But it's important for our industry. With traffic policies over many years and after analyzing vast amounts of data, we've developed and utilized over 180 signals and filters to help defend our network. We also give controls to publishers and advertisers to help them make the right decisions for their businesses. For example, we've added controls for both publishers and advertisers to give both more granular category options. And we've modified the way that we create and enforce policies to better protect the ecosystem, as well as to better help publishers. Recently, we've made an effort to align our content policies across all of Google. This includes AdSense, AdMob, and Google Ad Manager. We did this with the goal of creating a simpler experience for publishers. Along with this alignment, we've changed a number of policies to restrictions, which removes demonetization for certain types of content. However, we do indicate to publishers that limited ad serving may be in place. With restrictions, advertisers determine demand or lack thereof. And we make clear which types of content we will never monetize, again, with the goal of simplifying the publisher experience. Let's look at an example of how our policies worked before the launch of restrictions and how they work now. Before the change, alcohol content was a policy and is now a restriction. As a policy, any site that facilitated the online sale of alcohol or promoted alcohol consumption or portrayed alcohol in a favorable light would not be monetized. Now, as a restriction, we understand that advertisers may not find this content to be appealing or a good association with their brand. However, we let them decide. Our advertisers have a number of categories that they can choose from, and not all will opt into alcohol. Therefore, the end result is, content label as a restriction may receive limited or no monetization. However, it is no longer a policy violation. These changes are the result of our constant dialogue with publishers and trying to blend the needs of publishers with those of the ecosystem as a whole. You can find more information on both our policies and restrictions within our Help Center. Both are broken out and describe the types of content that fall into policy or restriction categories. So you now know the work of our team and what we are trying to achieve. Let's look at how automation and human review work together to enforce these policies. First, we review new publisher applications at the time of application, and then we continuously re-review existing publisher content all the time. Our review includes the utilization of automated systems as well as human review. And with our robust systems infrastructure, we can process vast amounts of data in seconds. Automated review is how we can protect the network at scale from the simple as well as the highly sophisticated threats, including click jacking, malware, and cookie stuffing. OK, so how does content and traffic policy enforcement benefit publishers? The most important benefit is this. We have high standards. Not only do publishers have to have good traffic to be part of our network, they also have to follow our policies. And these policies help ensure that we are selective. We reject 88% of all applications to join our network. Publishers that follow the rules benefit from not sharing advertiser dollars with publishers that do not meet our policy standards. We also have high standards with the advertisers we work with. In 2018, we rejected 2.3 billion ads and blocked nearly 59 million ads. We introduced 31 new ad policies to address abuse. And we've removed more than 6 million bad sites and apps per day. All of these policies and policy enforcement ultimately benefits the good publishers in our network. What are some best practices that you can implement to grow your business in a sustainable and policy compliant way? First, set up your account correctly. Segment what is your own responsibility versus what is managed by your publisher partners. Vet the publishers you partner with to minimize risk. Are you partnering with a real business? Make sure you answer these questions for each and every publisher you onboard. Who is this publisher? Do they have a business address? Does the address match with what you know about the publisher, the app or the website, and the who is information? How long have they been working on the app or the website? Who are the people behind the business? Do I trust them? What is your business model? Does the site offer value to its users or advertisers? And what are their traffic projections and are they realistic? If something doesn't add up to you, you need to investigate. Review your partners regularly, especially newcomers to the network. Schedule regular business reviews to analyze inventory that you've purchased. If there is a revenue spike, check UGC or implementation issues. If your partner is reluctant or unable to explain anomalies, they may pose a significant risk to your network. And understand your analytics. Monitor your traffic and understand what normal traffic patterns for your site look like. Proactive traffic monitoring can identify small issues before they become serious trouble. And break down your traffic reports into meaningful segments or channels. Lastly, we encourage publishers to become familiar with the work of industry groups like the IAB and TAG. At Google, we actively engage with industry groups through partnerships and collaborations. We believe that the entire industry should adopt policy best practices for invalid traffic, advertising implementations, and content. And that's why we've teamed up with the IAB and TAG on various initiatives. I hope all of this background has been helpful. What should you expect from my team going forward? We will continue to invest in transparency. We do this through face-to-face meetings with publishers of all sizes at global conferences and events and through the creation of materials, such as videos, such as this one you're watching. Additional specific policy videos can be found on our AdSense and AdMob YouTube channels. These videos go into some depth, explaining individual policies. We iterate on our AdSense and AdMob help centers to make them more useful. We create blog posts for our AdSense and AdMob blogs to help explain policies and best practices, and we utilize social media. We understand the challenges you face because we speak to you and we listen. As alluded to in the breakout of certain policies, to change certain topics to restrictions, this was all the result of feedback from our publishers. We listen, and importantly, we take that feedback to the team, so continue to dialogue with us.