• by Tony Silber , March 9, 2022

The Globe and Mail, published in Toronto and several other Canadian cities, announced this week that it completed and passed a digital audit from the third-party agency the Alliance for Audited Media.

This process, the Canadian media giant said in a press release on Wednesday, ensures that traffic coming to and navigating through the Globe and Mail’s website is valid and can be trusted by readers and the advertisers seeking to reach them.

As part of the audit, The Globe and Mail’s website operations, ad operations, social media, site monetization and sourced traffic were examined. The goal of media-brand third-party audits is to provide assurance that they’re delivering the audiences that they claim, that online traffic is actually human and not bots, and to minimize fraud risk. AAM’s Digital Publisher Audit is a continuous assurance program, and The Globe and Mail will undergo monthly testing to ensure traffic is safe and authentic.

“The Globe and Mail is highly invested in the brand safety of our site and it is important that our advertising partners understand this commitment,” Globe and Mail Managing Director of Ad Products and Innovation Tracy Day said. “AAM’s audit provides another opportunity to reaffirm the quality of our traffic from an objective, third-party source. In addition, we participate in other digital verification offerings, such as Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Tech Lab (Ads.txt).

The estimated global cost of digital ad fraud is expected to reach $50 billion by 2025, per the World Federation of Advertisers.

The Globe and Mail newspaper reaches 6.3 million readers every week in print and digital formats. The brand, based in Toronto, is owned by Woodbridge, the investment arm of the Thomson family, which merged the Thomson Corporation with Reuters in 2007.