Josh Jackson was shocked when he found out what term, if used in the music publication he co-founded, could automatically strip an article of ad revenue.
It was the word “song.”
That was just one of more than 4,000 “negative keywords” a major advertiser looking to run ads on Paste Magazine, Jackson’s website, included in a brand safety spreadsheet it shared with him.
And now that his magazine resurrected the iconic feminist media outlet Jezebel last November, essential journalism going unfunded because of brand safety concerns has become a more urgent issue. Jezebel has even launched a subscription option to help fund its reporting, filling in a revenue gap created by brand safety tech.
“We’ve been doing this a long time, but hadn’t really felt the effects of brand safety until we purchased Jezebel,” Jackson told Check My Ads. “(We) very quickly got into the deep end on everything brand safety related and it’s just been blowing my mind to see.”
Jackson — or anyone who cares about quality journalism — should find this brand safety technology mind-blowing (and not in a good way).
How is this happening?
No advertiser wants to go viral because their ad showed up next to extreme content or disinformation.
But rather than take careful, intentional steps to avoid that outcome, brand safety tech companies have been hawking the equivalent of a nuclear bomb to kill a fly — and news outlets like Jezebel are losing essential revenue in the process.
It works like this: brand safety companies help advertisers draw up a list of words they don’t want their brand associated with. Then, if any of those words show up on a webpage, the brand’s ad won’t be served.
In theory, keyword blocklists help advertisers keep their ads away from extreme content. In 2019, brand safety technology company Integral Ad Science published a list of most blocked keywords. It included: explosion, bomb, death, murder, kill, gun, rape.
But over time, IAS and its competitor DoubleVerify have encouraged advertisers to avoid running their ads on content that could be even vaguely “controversial” or make people feel negative.
Advertisers responded by adding a whole host of new keywords that basically describe the news and current events: “abortion,” “transgender” “racism,” and after the Parkland school shooting, “Parkland Florida.” And though best practice is to keep these blocklists short and update them monthly, most advertisers (and their agencies) don’t revisit them.
“You can just turn off anything that might possibly pose a brand safety problem,” Jackson explained. “But I don’t believe that that’s a good way to go for anyone — for the advertiser, for the publications, for the state of journalism.”
These worries becomes particularly problematic when you consider that companies like IAS have convinced advertisers that they don’t just want to avoid obviously hateful words — but also anything that isn’t “positive.” Nevermind that their technology is completely incapable of determining what content is positive and negative.
We previously caught IAS’s technology flagging a story about women’s sexual health as having “negative sentiment.”
Reporting from 404 Media suggests “brand safety” was “one of the biggest factors” behind G/O Media — Jezebel’s previous owner — making the decision to shut down the site. Its interim editor in chief told 404 Media the ads sales team had even gone so far as to ask if it could remove Jezebel’s tagline, “Sex. Celebrity. Politics. With Teeth,” from the site.
“When we made the decision to purchase Jezebel when it had been shut down, the decision was ‘we’re going to bring it back with its teeth,’” Jackson said.
“We can’t defang this site in order to please advertisers who […] might not even understand the consequences of their brand safety initiatives.”
Advertisers are demonetizing reporting on racism and sexism
Jackson has had a front-row seat to the impact of misguided brand safety efforts on journalism.
“We have hundreds of articles that Google has turned off ad serving on,” Jackson said. “It’s maddening. This is not– it can’t stay like this…I feel like I’m getting baptized by fire right now.”
It becomes “alarming,” he said, when you look at which kinds of articles are being stripped of revenue.
“We don’t do a ton of hip hop coverage, and when you look through the list of the articles that have been demonetized by Google — or ad restricted by Google, — quite a few of them are hip hop coverage, because we can quote lyrics that are dealing with race,” he said.
Another article Google “red-flagged” was an interview Paste did with Spike Lee, a film director who often explores racial issues in his work.
“It’s actually flagged it as dangerous and derogatory content,” Jackson said. “It steers into issues of race and things like that, but it was not dangerous, and it was not derogatory”
Paste tried to appeal the decision, but it was turned down “with no explanation,” he said. It wasn’t even clear a human being had looked at the appeal.
The tactics also have a huge impact on Jezebel, Jackson said, as they report on important issues like the degradation of women’s rights.
This reporting, however, landed Jezebel with a weekslong, site-wide restriction on ad serving due to “sexual content.”
“It wasn’t just it wasn’t any one specific story. It was, “oh, you just have too many of these. We’re punishing you by […] restricting the whole site,” he said.
Because of this restriction, Jezebel had days where it made “less than $50 from banner ads,” Jackson wrote on X. Without getting too specific, Jackson told Check My Ads this was a “precipitous drop” from the expected revenue.
Defunding the news isn’t advertisers’ intended goal, Jackson said.
“When you talk to people at any of these agencies, that’s not their intention — to defund actual coverage of important topics. It’s just a byproduct of everything that’s happening,” he said.
But, Jackson added, “What we have in place right now is far from a targeted protection of brands.”
As a result, news organizations are getting hurt.
“That is a real market pressure that is going to be felt, and I hope journalists stand strong and continue to report on those important things,” Jackson said. “News coverage is being penalized. Political coverage is being penalized […] of course it’s having an effect. I can’t stress that enough.”
Finding workarounds to keep essential journalism afloat
Jackson’s only choices have been to either “censor” his publications — and he said that’s off the table — or he can “turn off ad serving at the source” to avoid getting in trouble with Google, which currently handles most of his ads.
“We had to add technology to our site so we could suppress ads on certain pages, rather than censor ourselves, rather than delete the content, which is not ever going to be an option,” he explained.
“It’s a little maddening in 2024 to somehow be dealing with censorship online. Because Google has that power, to control that.”
Jackson said his publication has also been “very open” about the fact that its new subscription option is, in part, a bid to mitigate these brand safety-related revenue losses.
The publication wants to “have another way to monetize the site that is not reliant on the same couple technology companies,” he explained. “One in particular.”
Brand Safety tech companies are leading advertisers astray
This approach to brand safety isn’t just heavy-handed, it’s misguided.
Consumers actually trust brands more when they run adjacent to news, according to an IAB survey (which media organizations sponsored). They also find the brand “more relevant” and are more likely to either purchase or explore the brand.
Advertisers should want to reach the kinds of audiences news outlets can provide, according to Jackson.
“(We) have an audience to sell, and it’s a great audience. It is a target audience,” he said.
He had some advice for advertisers who are currently just “pushing out” ads “anywhere except where these negative words are.”
“Find trusted sites and support those sites,” Jackson said.
“I think that has a bigger impact than the shotgun approach that is happening right now, with ads going so many different places — and the common denominator is that they they don’t have the words ‘Black Lives Matter’ in the story.”
We agree.