YouTube is in the middle of another brand safety conundrum, but this time around the platform is making news for being proactive.
On July 26, YouTube removed four videos from Infowars—a digital publisher and dietary supplement empire run by Alex Jones that promotes outrageous conspiracy theories—and banned it from live streaming on its platform for 90 days. YouTube issued a statement that said Infowars violated its hate speech policies.
It was just a little over a year ago that several brands took their ads off YouTube in response to a report that The Times of London published about brand ads appearing in YouTube videos that promoted terrorism. Many of these advertisers came back to YouTube, but the ad industry hasn’t stopped talking about brand safety. The topic is so popular that a new trade group, Brand Safety Institute, launched July 25.
Here’s a quick look at the state of brand safety.
In June, Iponweb and ExchangeWire surveyed 129 media agency professionals worldwide and found that about six in 10 of those who built their own ad tech view brand safety as a major challenge of programmatic.