• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, 8 hours ago

New and revealing analysis of ad-supported news content on FAST channels shows that nearly 36% of “news scenes” are fully brand-safe, according to research from Wurl, the streaming subsidiary of AppLovin.

The bottom-line analysis reveals there are significant reasons to buy news content, “meaning advertisers who avoid news scenes altogether are leaving money on the table.”

Research showed brand-safe news content is still lower in brand safety than non-news content (35.7% versus 54.5%, respectively).

Bigger brand-safety risks are involved with content related to "death and harm," at 43%.

Content related to "violence" is next at 31%, followed by content related to "war and conflict" at 31%.

Other categories that were analyzed include content related to sex (at 3%) and profanity (at 2%), content that is derogatory at 2% and drug-related content, also at 2%.

The analysis also notes that politically oriented news is generally brand-safe overall, with brand-safety at 45.5% for blue-leaning news channels vs. 48.3% for red-leaning news platforms.

Better results come with financial news content, which is deemed the most brand-safe.

The study also indicates that heavy news viewers make up 3% of viewing streaming platforms, but comprise 63% of all news viewing.

The future could be better when it comes to deciding whether brands should buy into news, featuring new technology such as “scene-level AI analysis” which is slowly replacing less accurate keywords and categories to deal with unsafe news content.

Wurl says this analysis is important because news audiences are highly concentrated and difficult to reach elsewhere.