Nine guidelines help newsrooms protect their bottom line while also informing their audiences

Keyword blocklists are the most common — and blunt — form of brand safety and suitability, umbrella terms for controls advertisers use to protect their brands from negative reputation impacts. To assure that their brands are associated with positive, noncontroversial content, advertisers use keyword blocklists to avoid connection with news stories that include any of the restricted terms.

Industry blocklists (sometimes called “blacklists”) typically include thousands of keywords, such as “kill,” “death,” and “sex” and ad verification companies tout their extensive blocklists to potential advertisers.

Powered by algorithms, blocklists prevent news publishers from earning advertising revenues from vital content. They can also pressure newsrooms to avoid covering certain types of stories, a form of self-censorship.

In effect, blocklists penalize newsrooms (and other social media creators) for addressing many important types of current events. The results are especially problematic when blocklists incorrectly flag content that is safe or neutral, an outcome described as “overblocking.”

For instance, a 2019 study by the cybersecurity company CHEQ found that only nine of the 100 most-read news articles from the New York Times that year were deemed brand safe by keyword blocklists, which (inappropriately) excluded stories about mobile phone use, popular movies, and science.

Incorrect blocking of safe news content cost US publishers $2.8 billion, or “nearly one in every four dollars” of digital news advertising revenue, CHEQ found. Ultimately, preventing ads next to vital news could decimate newsrooms who use ads as a revenue stream. 

Nine recommendations to evade blocklists

Savvy newsrooms can employ the following nine recommendations to minimize the negative impacts of advertising blocklists on their bottom lines while fulfilling the ethical commitment to informing their audiences.

• Communicate clearly with existing advertisers. Advertisers drive keyword blocking. Encourage those that already support your newsroom to review their blocklists and avoid overly broad terms, words, or phrases. Advertisers benefit from precise controls, which allow them to support a broader array of news content with confidence.
• Keep up with terms likely to be blocked. The most commonly blocked terms included “attack,” “racial,” “shoot,” “bisexual,” and “conspiracy,” while “dead,” “injury,” “lesbian,” and “gun” were among the terms most frequently subject to incorrect blocking, according to a second CHEQ study from 2019. The same year, YouTube creators Sybreed and Sealow published a report based on a 15,000 word list of title keywords that YouTube had either monetized or demonetized.
• At the very least, craft URLs for web content with blocklists in mind. Some blocklists only examine the URL string, but not the content or the article itself. When posting a news article, avoid using any terms likely to appear on keyword blocklists in the article’s URL.
• Promote inclusion lists, as advocated by Steven Brill, author of The Death of Truth. Inclusion lists, Brill explains, “allow advertisers to focus their ad spend on pre-vetted, high-quality websites that align with their brand values and target audience.” Inclusion lists help advertisers distinguish between quality journalism and what a 2023 study produced by the Association of National Advertisers described as “MFAs” or “made-for-advertising” websites.
• Accentuate the positive: Advertisers are wary of news outlets partly due to the psychological impacts of a steady barrage of negative news on potential customers. Solutions journalism, as promoted by the Solutions Journalism Network and YES! Magazine, for instance, exemplifies a more positive approach to covering newsworthy  topics that might otherwise discourage or depress audiences. Robust studies show that audiences respond positively to journalism that helps them envision and build a more equitable and sustainable world—which, in turn, can push advertisers to rethink whether narrow conceptions of brand safety apply to quality journalism.

• Help the public understand the stakes by reporting on advertising blocklists. For examples, see the New Humanitarian’s 2021 report about advertisers defunding crisis journalism and the Markup’s 2021 pair of reports exposing significant loopholes in the YouTube blocklist intended to restrict advertisers from building campaigns around hate terms.

Promoting public understanding might include looking for story leads that address any of these final three, broader recommendations:

• Join efforts to reform overblocking, which ultimately depend on greater transparency and decreasing information asymmetries among advertisers, brand safety companies, and news publishers.
• Call on brand safety companies to do their part. “Brand safety needs to be a conversation involving people, not technology that is ill-equipped for today’s digital publishing landscape,” Orlando Reece, CEO of Pride Media, which owns the LGBTQ+ news website The Advocate, told CHEQ.
• Support development of AI that provides contextual understanding of keywords. Contextual advertising is replacing the most blunt forms of keyword blocklisting. One company has used diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) texts to train an AI model that correctly categorizes more than eighty percent of news content — which leaves much room for improvement — but, encouragingly, by using a racial diversity filter the AI unblocked five percent of content otherwise deemed “sensitive.”

News avoidance is an indirect impact of blocklists

“Advertisers’ brand safety concerns are an underappreciated force shaping social media governance, with worrying implications for media freedom and diversity,” according to Rachel Griffin, whose research focuses on the implications of social media regulation.

Newsrooms whose content is shut out by advertising blocklists can, of course, seek alternative revenue sources. But the scope and quality of reporting is also vulnerable to blocklisting’s indirect consequences: If news outlets respond by avoiding coverage of topics likely to be blocked, the quality and reputation of online journalism could be significantly damaged, while the public would be deprived of quality reporting on crucial issues.

These concerns are not hypothetical. The negative impacts of overblocking have been especially pronounced on minority media, including Black and LGBTQ+ publishers. 

Blocklists also restrict specific new topics, including coverage of humanitarian crises, climate change (as reported by Insider and Bloomberg), the coronavirus pandemic (as reported by BuzzFeed, the Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal), and even some coverage on the 2024 Paris Olympics.

News avoidance typically refers to how and why audiences avoid news — but, given the influence of advertising blocklists on journalism, the concept can be extended to apply to advertisers, who do not want their product or “brand” associated with certain types of news stories, and, in a worst case scenario, to newsrooms that avoid specific types of stories in mistaken efforts to maintain advertising revenues. The recommendations here aim to empower newsrooms to forestall the worst of these impacts.

Please share your experience

Does your newsroom have experience with advertising blocklists? Have you developed effective strategies for mitigating their impact on your ability to cover important stories? If so, please contact me at info@alfj.org to share your experience and insights, which will help strengthen the final version of Algorithmic Literacy for Journalists when it is launched publicly in March 2025.

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Cite this article

Roth, Andy Lee (2024, Nov. 25). How advertising blocklists undermine online journalismd responding to shadow bans. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/how-advertising-blocklists-undermine-online-journalism/