Because, unfortunately, “it’s a great business,” says L. Gordon Crovitz, a longtime journalist, former publisher of The Wall Street Journal and co-founder of NewsGuard, speaking on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks. NewsGuard estimates that large, well-known advertisers – the sort of advertisers that get very uptight about brand safety – are unintentionally funneling as much as $2.6 billion through programmatic pipes directly to misinformation websites every year. Crovitz shared that his former colleagues at The Wall Street Journal would sometimes be unable to sell half the site’s ad inventory because it was deemed “brand unsafe.”That’s the plight of news publishers. But the publisher of PinkNews responded to say that he aspired to have only half of his inventory seen as brand unsafe. and what it was like to help broker what was possibly the first-ever programmatically sold ad on the internet in the late ’90s.

Source: Wall Street Journal May 16, 2023 22:03 UTC