11/20/2023

NewsGuard Launches Ukraine Inclusion List of Quality Ukrainian News Outlets for Advertisers

After announcing its ratings expansion to Ukraine in partnership with RSF, NewsGuard facilitates investment in quality Ukrainian media buys for advertisers, generating new revenue opportunities for publishers in the country.

(Nov. 20, 2023 — New York) NewsGuard, the leading provider of news credibility data for advertisers, agencies, and ad exchanges, today announced its “Ukraine Inclusion List for Advertisers,” allowing brands and advertisers to direct advertising spend toward quality journalism and supporting democracy in Ukraine. 

This follows NewsGuard’s expansion of its ratings to war-torn Ukraine, where it has rated 25 Ukrainian news outlets in partnership with Paris-based NGO Reporters Without Borders and its Journalism Trust Initiative. 

Ukrainian news websites with high trust scores (60/100 and above) are featured in NewsGuard’s Inclusion List used to place programmatic advertising on websites. This gives advertisers, ad agencies, and ad-tech companies an easy way to include high-quality Ukrainian publishers in their programmatic and direct ad buys to help offset the collapse of the advertising market in Ukraine and show their support to Ukrainian media and democracy.

“Many brands are looking for a way to support Ukraine that is both efficient and brand safe,” said Gordon Crovitz, NewsGuard’s co-CEO. “This inclusion list helps them do precisely that. More than ever, Ukrainians need a transparent, independent, and financially viable journalism industry. Brands now have a unique opportunity to support credible outlets in the country with their ad budgets.” 

NewsGuard’s brand safety service, BrandGuard, is derived from its Reliability Ratings of news and information websites. The ratings are compiled by trained journalists based on nine apolitical journalistic criteria relating to credibility and transparency — such as whether a site transparently corrects factual errors, distinguishes news from opinion, or uses deceptive headlines. Each website receives a 0-100 score, indicating its overall credibility, and a score on each of the nine criteria. 

In the coming months, NewsGuard will continue expanding its Ukraine Inclusion List, rating more news websites as part of Reporters Without Borders’ Journalism Trust Initiative (JTI) Emergency Protocol. NewsGuard regularly updates its ratings, including when major changes occur in a site’s practices, so brands benefit from the most up-to-date data on trustworthiness. Like NewsGuard’s other off-the-shelf Inclusion Lists, the Ukraine Inclusion List can easily be activated at the click of a button as pre-bid segments in Peer39, and through agency teams at advertising holding companies. The Ukraine Inclusion List can also be activated using PMPs within ad tech partner platforms such as Pubmatic, OpenX and Connatix.  

Research has shown that advertising on trustworthy news isn’t just good for journalism—it’s also good business. Indeed, advertising on highly credible news sources is proven to improve campaign performance by reaching valuable, highly engaged audiences in a trusted environment. A case study published with IPG Mediabrands, showed that an advertiser using NewsGuard’s curated “maximum safety” inclusion list achieved a 9% lower effective CPM and 143% increase in click-through rates by targeting trusted news sites.

To learn more about NewsGuard’s services for advertisers, click here or email partnerships@newsguardtech.com.

 

About NewsGuard 

Founded by media entrepreneur and award-winning journalist Steven Brill and former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz, NewsGuard provides transparent tools to counter misinformation for readers, brands, and democracies. Since launching in 2018, its global staff of trained journalists and information specialists has collected, updated, and deployed more than 6.9 million data points on more than 35,000 news and information sources, and cataloged and tracked all of the top false narratives spreading online.

NewsGuard’s analysts, powered by multiple AI tools, operate the trust industry’s largest and most accountable dataset on news. These data are deployed to fine-tune and provide guardrails for generative AI models, enable brands to advertise on quality news sites and avoid propaganda or hoax sites, provide media literacy guidance for individuals, and support democratic governments in countering hostile disinformation operations targeting their citizens.

Among other indicators of the scale of its operations is that NewsGuard’s apolitical and transparent criteria have been applied by its analysts to rate news sources accounting for 95% of online engagement with news across nine countries.