04/02/2020

Peer39 and NewsGuard partner to help brands avoid fake news and untrustworthy sites

Advertisers can buy news category inventory with knowledge that ads only appear on pages from trusted, legitimate news media

(April 02, 2020) News content accounts for nearly one out of every five targetable ad impressions online, creating a clear opportunity for advertisers looking to reach engaged consumers. Yet for all of the legitimate content available, fake news remains a scourge on the internet, with legitimate-looking sites popping up to take advantage of programmatic buying automation while propagating misinformation. 

Naturally, brands looking to buy news content want to avoid the divisive issues and low credibility associated with fake news. Peer39 and NewsGuard have collaborated on a new solution that helps brands find the right people in the right context, while also ensuring that ads appear alongside content from legitimate news media.

Peer39, the leading provider of page-level intelligence, has incorporated NewsGuard’s database of trust ratings for thousands of news and information websites as an added layer of protection for advertisers using its offering. Using the service, brands can target their ad campaigns on thousands of trusted news sources while avoiding misinformation sources flagged by NewsGuard’s team of trained journalists. This includes a flag for COVID-19 misinformation specifically, which NewsGuard’s analysts have been cataloging in the company’s Coronavirus Misinformation Tracking Center.

“We’re seeing in this crisis just how crucial quality journalism is, with millions relying on their local news organizations for information they can trust amid all of the inaccurate information being shared,” said David Chavern, CEO of the News Media Alliance, which represents hundreds of news publishers. “Advertisers who flee from news content in this time are not only damaging the journalism industry, they’re endangering public health and safety. We applaud Peer39 and NewsGuard for offering brands a way to continue advertising on trusted news sources while avoiding misinformation sites.” 

The offering is available today through MediaMath and AppNexus and will be available through most major Demand-Side Platforms (DSPs) in the coming weeks.

“The relationship between advertiser and publisher needs to be built on trust and credibility, but deceitful, opportunistic publishers of fake news have led advertisers to hold money back, even from legitimate content, out of fear about content credibility,” said Peer39 CEO Mario Diez. “This partnership allows advertisers to invest in the News category with full confidence, knowing that they have detailed page-level intelligence, at scale, with the most rigorous data on source quality available for news websites built right in.”

The data set covers all the news and information sites that account for 95% of online engagement in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany and Italy and includes flags for specific categories of false news, such as health misinformation, conspiracy theories and hoax stories, enabling advertisers to target their campaign more granularly to avoid certain kinds of unreliable sites. 

“Without a good way to determine reliability of news content, many advertisers have simply chosen to avoid advertising on news content altogether,” said NewsGuard Co-CEO Gordon Crovitz. “This is bad for the financially challenged journalism industry, bad for democracy and bad for public health. It’s also a missed opportunity for those brands to reach valuable and engaged audiences. Advertisers using our new offering with Peer39 can avoid running campaigns on all of those sites with the check of a box in their DSP.”

About Peer39

Peer39 is an independent data company that provides the largest data set available in the digital advertising ecosystem. Every day, the industry’s leading brands, agencies, and publishers trust Peer39’s AI-powered semantic analysis engine to provide a holistic understanding of page content, meaning, and sentiment.  We do this by analyzing the relationship between words on a page, the content of a video, or in an app, ensuring appropriate classification. As people’s time and attention become more fragmented, Peer39 believes that to succeed, you need as much contextual understanding of your audience as possible. We believe that it’s as much about the digital environment as it is about the physical environment. Only then can you deliver the right ad to the right user in the right context.

About NewsGuard

Launched in March 2018 by media entrepreneur Steven Brill and former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz, NewsGuard provides credibility ratings and detailed “Nutrition Labels” for thousands of news and information websites that account for 95% of online engagement across the U.S., U.K., Germany, France, and Italy. 

NewsGuard employs journalists to rate each site based on nine apolitical criteria of journalistic practice, including whether a site repeatedly publishes false content, whether it regularly corrects or clarifies errors, and whether it avoids deceptive headlines. Based on the criteria, each site receives a trust score of 0-100 and an overall rating of “Green,” indicating the site is generally reliable, or “Red,” indicating that it is not reliable. 

NewsGuard’s ratings and Nutrition Labels can be licensed by internet service providers, browsers, news aggregators, and social media and search platforms. Consumers can access NewsGuard’s ratings through its browser extension  Android and iOS apps, and the Edge mobile browser. Over 700of libraries globally use NewsGuard’s free media literacy browser extension on their public-access computers for patrons.