As part of PubMatic’s ongoing commitment to provide our customers with brand-safe and measurable inventory quality across our platform, we are proud to announce a new partnership with NewsGuard. Along with corresponding policy updates, this partnership gives our buyers confidence that news and journalism sites on our platform meet certain guidelines of trustworthiness in order to be monetized.
How This Works
Identifying and classifying misinformation in a fully transparent and disclosed manner — using a consistent, unbiased framework — is important and complex work and NewsGuard is a leader in that effort.
Data provided by NewsGuard will be used to prevent monetization on our platform by websites that do not meet the criteria required to receive an overall NewsGuard ‘Green’ rating (“generally trustworthy”). To assign ratings, NewsGuard’s team of in-house journalists review thousands of news and information sites on nine criteria, each of which is assigned a pass/fail point total. More details on their review process can be found here.
Why This Is Important
Buyers have different preferences when it comes to brand safety, therefore we have created a brand safety floor, a baseline across the PubMatic platform (learn more about our supply policy here). These new amendments to our current digital media inventory quality policies enhance the focus on journalism and news. The benefits are clear:
- Advertisers and agencies can now transact more confidently, knowing their ads will not appear on sites that fall below the NewsGuard and PubMatic standards. This helps advertisers protect the equity of the premium brands they represent.
- Publishers who meet and exceed our new policy and NewsGuard’s requirements will benefit from the halo effect of being held to both companies’ high inventory standards and being included on PubMatic’s premium, brand-safe publisher platform.
- It is the intention that this partnership leads others in the industry to join in creating a more efficient, brand-safe media ecosystem that benefits consumers, advertisers, publishers, and society at large.
We hope that our actions will encourage our customers and partners, and the entire ad tech ecosystem, to have renewed confidence that the programmatic marketplace can be a force for good that supports quality journalism. For our part, we know that the PubMatic platform is a powerful driver of publisher revenue and advertiser ROI worldwide, and with great power comes great responsibility.
