• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, December 8, 2021

One of the ways supply-side platforms (SSPs) help publishers is by “setting floors” -- usually the minimum price they will entertain as part of a programmatic bid -- but now one of the biggest is setting a floor on the veracity of news and journalism sites it will allow advertisers and agencies to buy through its platform.

“This partnership gives our buyers confidence that news and journalism sites on our platform meet certain guidelines of trustworthiness in order to be monetized,” PubMatic Senior Director of Marketplace Quality Eric Bozinny writes in a post made on the platform’s blog today, disclosing a deal with news and information site veracity ratings service NewsGuard.

The integration of NewsGuard’s ratings data into PubMatic follows similar deals with Index Exchange, Teads, and TripleLift, as well as contextual ad networks like GumGum, Peer39 and Meetrics though surprisingly, none have been announced to date with a major demand-side platform (DSP), which would seem like a natural fit for safeguarding programmatic advertising buys from the demand-side.

Audience measurement platform Comscore, however, previously announced it has integrated NewsGuard data into its pre-bid contextual targeting options for DSPs.

Also representing the demand-side, several big agency holding companies, including IPG Mediabrands, Publicis and Omnicom, have also licensed and are incorporating NewsGuard’s data into their inclusion and exclusion lists of news and information sites they will buy.

“We have created a brand safety floor, a baseline across the PubMatic platform,” PubMatic’s Bozinny said in today’s post, noting that only news sites receiving a “green rating” -- or “generally trustworthy” -- will be available for programmatic bids on the platform.