Yes, really. 

This year, CNN International has tracked nearly 8,000 keywords blocked on its sites, Newsweek regularly sees up to 50% of its inventory blocked, and articles on Reach that mention “Trump” and “war” yield a 20% reduction in revenue, according to data each publisher shared with Digiday.

“Whenever inventory is flagged as brand unsafe, the CPMs are 30% lower,” Newsweek CEO Dev Pragad told Digiday. “And if you’re making $100 million in revenue, a 30% drop is [a loss of] $30 million. So that’s probably all your profit margin gone,” he said.

As with most things in the messy online ecosystem — where business models often clash — publishers have little choice but to play nice on the surface. But in recent years, tensions have simmered between all stakeholders: publishers, marketers, and ad verification tech providers like DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science. 

Many are frustrated the problem persists despite years of available AI-powered keyword optimization tools and research showing that advertising alongside hard news doesn’t harm brands. Some publishers blame agency buyer inertia or a disconnect between agency leadership and day-to-day practice, while others fault tech vendors for inaction.

“A couple of companies have built a massive business by blocking inventory. And changing the status quo means disrupting that revenue stream,” said Pragad. “So it’s kind of become a zero-sum game where our loss of revenue has been their gain, and changing the status quo would mean they would potentially lose money for us to recover the money we have lost.”

DoubleVerify seems to be actively working to change this perception, positioning itself more overtly as an ally for publishers. At Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity this week, the tech vendor has been working to convince advertisers — and skeptics — that it can help fix the brand safety system, which many say it helped break.

On Monday, just as the first ad execs began to hit the Croisette, DoubleVerify revealed the 10 members of its News Accelerator Publisher Council — the latest step in its mission to restrict keyword blocking to “unclassified URLs” and update its tools to help avoid excessive blocking against news. 

The Atlantic, CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times and the Local Media Consortium are among the members, with more to be added in the coming weeks. Throughout Cannes Lions, DV execs have met with leading agency and advertiser partners to discuss the Publisher Council and its News Accelerator initiative, which includes AI-powered keyword optimization tools that refresh outdated keyword lists based on historical data and more contextual segments that promote ad placement alongside news content. 

“The council will serve as an ongoing forum for publishers to share insights, surface challenges, and help shape future innovations that drive advertiser confidence and investment across a broad array of news,” said Jack Marshall, DoubleVerify’s head of news, policy and content partnerships, in an email to Digiday.

“Early advertiser feedback [to the updated tools] has been overwhelmingly positive and we’re working with advertisers to drive adoption,” said Marshall. The keyword enhancements are designed with the day-to-day decision-makers in mind — those directly influencing monetization outcomes for publishers, he stressed. “DV’s keyword tool has always operated like a scalpel — not a blunt instrument — by targeting only the URL string rather than full-page content. Still, broadly applied or outdated keyword lists have sometimes led to overblocking, particularly in news environments,” he added.

No more talk, publishers want action

As a council member, CNN will measure the results of the new tools. “DoubleVerify making this effort and bringing together senior leaders from across the news industry is a pretty solid progression on their News Accelerator and a stake in the ground that’s bringing together the people most affected by this, with the technologies enabling it, for really detailed, action-based meetings,” Rob Bradley told Digiday from Cannes. “And that’s what we want — action.” 

There’s been no shortage of Cannes panels with advertiser execs touting support for quality journalism — but, he said, the time for talk is over. “We are getting in the room, sharing our problems, and being very honest about the challenges we’ve got and how it affects our businesses, and at the same time that enables them [DV] to think about how they can come up with technical solutions,” said Bradley. 

The Council met on June 12 and will continue to meet regularly. Council members weighed in on DV’s recent keyword updates and efforts to encourage more nuanced practices, including new alerts prompting advertisers to regularly review their blocklists. 

“We all, as an industry, have to be a little bit smarter about how we buy on news,” said Dave Strauss, vp of revenue operations and strategy for the Guardian and member of the DV council. “Because of this trend, news has scaled a little bit cheaper, so buying on news will offer them [marketers] more efficiencies until it catches up.”

The timing may raise a few eyebrows. DV is facing mounting scrutiny on multiple fronts. The Department of Justice is looking into how DV operates and any potential conflicts of interest in the ad verification market. At the same time, a damning report from Adalytics has questioned the effectiveness of DV’s bot filtering, prompting DV to file a defamation suit. 

Time will tell if the News Accelerator program delivers. For some, the irony of the move still weighs too heavily. “This is a reactive move. They [DV] won’t convince me that it couldn’t have been done years ago,” said Alessandro de Zanche, media consultant and former News UK exec, from Cannes. “Publishers have been screaming for help for a long time,” he said, adding that it’s almost like publishers are suffering from a form of “Stockholm syndrome.”

And yet, he added that publishers too, should accept their share of the blame. “As a publisher, if you joined the open marketplace, then you should be prepared that you’re in the company of millions of other websites. If you’re swimming in the sewage, there are measures to try to filter the sewage out [blocklists]. It’s not that publishers are just the victims here,” he added.  

What we’ve heard on the Croisette

“The thing that will completely shift podcasting is when audio is more present within search. As audio is more and more available in those worlds, it’s going to be easier for people to find great episodes. When somebody is looking up an article on something topical… it’s going to start surfacing this crazy huge library of content that we have.”

 — Will Pearson, president of iHeartPodcasts, on the IAB Tech Lab’s LLM Content Ingest API framework.

Numbers to know 

£368.5 million ($495.5 million): revenue reported by The Economist Group in its 2025 Annual Report Summary – up from £359.5 million ($483.4 million) in 2024.

26 million: The number of scrapes from AI bots bypassed robots.txt for sites in March 2025, according to TollBit.

54%: The percentage of Americans that get their news from social media and video platforms, more than TV (50%) or news websites/apps (48%) for the first time, marking a major shift toward creators and away from traditional media, per Reuters Digital News Report 2025.

50,000: The number of advertisers that used Amazon’s suite of AI tools to plan, onboard, create, and optimize campaigns in Q1, according to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.

What we’ve covered

Brands go large on entertainment investment in Cannes

• Whether it’s Mattell’s creative chief Perry Flair in conversation with Winterberry Group dealmaker Bruce Bielgel on the rooftop of Smartly’s penthouse suite, or Dentsu using its beach cabana to announce its global push into sports and entertainment, the message is clear: brands aren’t dabbling in entertainment — they’re investing in it.
• The language of creativity at Cannes Lions Festival also now shares space — loudly with the logic of code, cloud and optimization. The tech presence at Cannes isn’t new, but this year it feels more embedded. 

  Read more here.

Publishers are putting more resources into Reddit as it becomes a bigger traffic driver

• Referral traffic from Reddit has risen from 200,000 monthly pageviews to 2-4 million on Newsweek’s site. Now there are three Newsweek staffers posting on the platform.
• The Atlantic’s tactic is usually to post a link to their story, with a long blurb (submitted and then vetted by a subreddit moderator) written by an Atlantic editor. These posts often have tens of thousands of interactions, such as votes and comments.

  Read more here. 

The Guardian has unified its programmatic ad operations to capitalize on curation and PMP opportunities 

• The Guardian aims to simplify the buying process for advertisers by offering a more centralized point of access to its global inventory.
• The Guardian’s vp of revenue and strategy Dave Strauss says he is “more pro-curation” than his peers but that the industry as a whole needs to be more transparent around fees.

  Read more here. 

YouTube diversifies ways for creators to make Shorts revenue

• YouTube is expanding its internal brand partnership tools and its relationships with third-party creator monetization vendors — all part of a broader effort to create new revenue streams for Shorts creators.
• Recent partnerships with companies like Agentio and StreamElements aim to connect Shorts creators with brands, as YouTube seeks to expand monetization opportunities.

  Read more here. 

MOW urges DOJ to merge oversight of Google’s search and ad tech monopoly cases

• Lobby group Movement for an Open Web (MOW) is urging the Justice Department to coordinate its remedies for Google’s monopolies in search and ad tech, following recent rulings.
• MOW calls for the merging of separate technical committees overseeing the two cases, advocating for a unified, holistic approach to address Google’s market power.

Read more here.

What we’re reading 

Social and video platforms have overtaken traditional sources as the primary way Americans access news. Unlike the 2016 “Trump bump,” which lifted all media, this cycle has mainly boosted creator-driven platforms like social media and podcasts.

Business Insider CEO outlines new AI policy for staff 

The publisher has outlined a new AI policy, in line with its ambition to further embed Enterprise GPT and generative AI into its workflows. 

CNN is in the first stage of rolling out its five-year paid version

CNN has outlined more detail on its strategy to develop 15 content verticals, each of which will take nine months to develop – as part of its long game in creating a paid streaming service. 

Reach expands its Substack presence 

Reach is expanding its Substack presence with a new wave of free, topic-based newsletters, aiming to grow and engage its sizable UK audience while building on earlier experiments with paid formats.