After two years of watching its ad revenue plummet, it looks like X — the app formerly known as Twitter — has found a willing scapegoat: the brand safety verification company DoubleVerify.
In a post published Friday evening, X Business claimed that from October 24, 2023 to March 14, 2024, DoubleVerify had displayed an incorrect “Brand Safety Rate,” which is the measure of how often ads showed up next to toxic content.
In fact, throughout that period, X actually had — and continues to have — a Brand Safety Rate that “exceeded 99.99%,” DoubleVerify wrote.
If you’re confused as to how a website that has made countless headlines for soaring hate, unrestricted pornography accounts, and rampant disinformation apparently as close as you can get to 100% brand safe, we can help.
It’s because DoubleVerify’s brand safety promises are a farce.
Why is DoubleVerify unreliable?
DoubleVerify is one of a handful of ad verification companies that claim to check whether ads are being served as reported. This includes viewability (making sure ads are actually showing up, visibly, on a given website) and brand safety (checking that ads aren’t running alongside toxic content).
It then serves up a Brand Safety Rate on a dashboard that advertisers can consult when considering where they’d like to place their ads.
While this sounds good in theory, peek under the hood of DoubleVerify’s methodology and you realize its “brand safe” rating is built on methodology that’s shakier than a car on cobblestones.
Because DoubleVerify doesn’t really “measure” anything on X*.* That’s not how things work with “walled gardens” like Twitter, Meta, YouTube, and other social platforms that get to choose what “independent 3rd parties” they work with. What’s really happening is that DoubleVerify reports on data that X makes available to it.
That’s right. Despite the fact that they’re supposed to be an independent third party, DoubleVerify — like other verification vendors that ‘measure’ brand safety on social platforms — effectively relies on X for access to the data it then summarizes as a “Brand Safety Rating.”
There’s a difference between independent measurement and reporting on what you’re allowed to see — and DoubleVerify does the latter.
DoubleVerify has a weird standard for “brand safe”
When you realize that X itself supplies the data used to grade its brand safety, the “exceeded 99.99%” Brand Safety Rate starts to make a lot more sense.
Because, in November 2023 — after DoubleVerify claimed X’s real “Brand Safety Rate” had topped “99.99%” — Apple, Disney, Lionsgate and IBM paused ads on X in the wake of Elon Musk calling an antisemitic conspiracy theory posted on X “the actual truth.”
Earlier this year, we documented ads being served on Twitter posts that amplify unhinged conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. We also saw ads under conspiracy-laden tweets Jones amplified.
On top of that, brands did not suddenly begin pausing their advertising after DoubleVerify’s supposed October error. X’s ad revenue had dropped more than 50% by July of 2023 — well before DoubleVerify began publishing an “incorrect” Brand Safety Rating.
The problem with brand safety companies
DoubleVerify isn’t an outlier. The brand safety space is largely a reputation-washing front with questionable standards and opaque methodology.
Take, for example, the Trustworthy Accountability Group — which quietly renewed X’s Brand Safety Certified seal late last summer. We immediately filed a formal complaint.
Now, X is no longer “Brand Safety Certified.”
It doesn’t make sense that TAG ever renewed X’s brand safety seal after Musk’s takeover. But, like DoubleVerify, TAG’s pay-to-play model begs the question of whether its “seals” are little more than a meaningless rubber stamp. TAG funds itself largely through hefty certification fees, and it doesn’t do any audits on member organizations itself — instead relying on them to get their own independent auditors to validate that they adhere to TAG’s requirements.
Here’s the kicker — these companies also help each other look better. Because guess which other company is TAG certified? DoubleVerify. And, unsurprisingly, “independent measurement” isn’t actually one of TAG’s requirements.
An easy out for X
Despite all these glaring issues with the claim, X CEO Linda Yaccarino wasted no time pinning the platform’s dismal ad performance on DoubleVerify.
“DV displayed an extremely low and misleading Brand Safety Rating for X. That’s had a significant impact on our business,” she wrote in a post on X.
“Now that the error has been recognized, apologized for and corrected — I urge those advertisers who have made partnership decisions with X based on the erroneous data to reconsider.”
We also recommend advertisers making decisions based on erroneous data to reconsider their ad placements.
Unfortunately, that might not work out so well for X.