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Let's start with a number: $2.8 billion.

That's roughly how much incorrect keyword blocking costs U.S. publishers in a single year. Not fraud. Not some shadowy MFA scheme dreamed up in a server farm by people who should know better. Just someone, somewhere, at some agency, with too much power and too little curiosity, deciding that the word "shoot" is dangerous and a basketball recap about LeBron James loses ad revenue because of it.

Welcome to brand safety in 2025, where the tools designed to protect brands are quietly executing a years-long heist on the publishers those same brands desperately need to survive. It is the tech industry's version of burning down the restaurant to protect the health code.

We talked to dozens of people across the ecosystem. Publishers, SSPs, tech vendors, agency folks who probably shouldn't have been as candid as they were over a conference drink. And if there is one thing they universally, wearily, almost comically agree on, it is this: the blunt instruments are broken, everyone knows they are broken, and somehow they are still the default.

As Heather Carver currently of TVScientific once told us a while back:

"There's a lot of legacy tools and deep agency relationships with some of these companies that are kind of just built into the workflow and have become just sort of the status quo."

Status quo. Two words that in adtech almost always mean someone is getting hurt and the people doing the hurting have a renewal coming up and absolutely no intention of examining their life choices.

Here is how this works for anyone who has somehow avoided this particular circle of hell: traditional keyword blocklists scan page text for words like "shoot," "shot," "kill," "attack," "victims," "injuries" and automatically suppress ads on any page where they appear. Sounds reasonable until you realize that "a blocked shot by LeBron James," "victims of a second-quarter collapse," and "attack on the basket" are now classified alongside actual crime reporting by an algorithm that has the contextual sophistication of a golden retriever reading Shakespeare.

Sports publishers getting demonetized. Fashion sites losing revenue on photoshoots. LGBTQ+ outlets watching over 70% of otherwise safe articles get blocked because the words "lesbian" or "same sex" appear somewhere in the text, despite the complete absence of anything a reasonable human being would call inappropriate. News publishers covering health, geopolitics, and crime getting financially kneecapped because "war" and "drugs" showed up in responsible, fact-based journalism that their readers actually need.

And then there is the single greatest data point in the entire sordid history of this ongoing catastrophe: the letter O was on an agency blocklist this year. The letter O. A vowel. Foundational to the English language. Present in the word "on." Brand unsafe, apparently, to someone who is still employed and making decisions that affect real businesses.

When a single vowel becomes a brand hazard, the system is not protecting anyone. It is just running on autopilot while publishers watch their revenue bleed out on the floor.

Major news publishers report that between 40 and 60 percent of their inventory is negatively impacted by keyword blocking and generic brand safety tools. And here is the truly beautiful, maddening irony of it: this hits hardest during their highest-traffic coverage moments. The very times publishers drive the most readers, breaking news, tentpole sports events, major cultural moments that people are actively seeking out, are precisely when the blocklists go absolutely feral and start devouring inventory like a Roomba that has lost its mind.

When large portions of inventory get flagged as unsafe, the auction collapses. CPMs crater across the entire site, not just on the blocked pages. The damage radiates outward like a stone thrown into a pond, except the pond is someone's business and the stone is a keyword list nobody has reviewed since 2019.

And this is not just a publisher problem.

The evidence is not subtle at this point. Studies of news environments show ads placed next to high-attention, genuinely captivating articles drive more purchase behavior, not less. One IAS study found that when blocklists were relaxed in favor of contextual brand suitability, around 70% of previously flagged impressions were deemed safe and could be monetized without introducing any real brand risk whatsoever. Platforms running controlled tests on reopening premium news inventory are reporting meaningful CTR gains and lower CPAs.

Playing it safe with crude tools is not safe. It is expensive. For everybody sitting at the table, including the advertisers who have been told, repeatedly, that this is all being done for their benefit.

Here is the part that should make your eye twitch involuntarily at your next industry conference: this is a solved problem, technologically speaking.

Modern contextual tools from the likes of IAS, DoubleVerify and companies like Seedtag use AI to classify full-page context rather than hunting for individual words like some kind of deranged Ctrl-F exercise that escaped the 2005 internet and never found its way home.

These systems analyze combinations of text, image, video, and audio to determine whether a page is genuinely unsafe versus simply discussing something complicated in a responsible and entirely advertiser-friendly way. Brand suitability frameworks now exist that let advertisers define actual nuanced risk thresholds instead of defaulting to the rhetorical equivalent of burning down the neighborhood to kill one spider.

The technology has sprinted ahead. The decisioning has not moved an inch.

Why? It is the easy button. It is the way things have always been done. Agencies default to static legacy blocklists because they are simple to operationalize and carry the comforting appearance of due diligence, which is the adtech version of pointing at a very official-looking binder and saying you did your job. Nobody got fired for blocking the news. Nobody is being held accountable for the billions in publisher revenue that evaporate every year as a direct and completely traceable consequence either.

The conversation has to start at the top. CMOs. Agency leadership. The people with actual authority to change the procurement process rather than just the people implementing whatever they are told at nine in the morning with a coffee they haven't finished. Bringing the right parties into the room, the Ad Fontes contingent, the IAB Tech Lab people, the publishers who can articulate the actual editorial and monetization reality, is how change starts to happen.

Back to the $2.8 billion. That is not a rounding error. That is not acceptable collateral damage in service of protecting a brand from appearing next to a photoshoot or a golf article or, apparently, the letter O. That is a structural failure wearing a brand safety costume at a party where everyone can see through the disguise but nobody wants to be the one to say it out loud.

For publishers without the lobbying muscle of a Times or a Reuters, this is existential. LGBTQ+ outlets. Local news. Minority-focused publications. Health and science journalism. These are the publishers getting hit hardest by blanket blocking and they have the least leverage and the fewest resources to absorb it or fight back against it.

There is also something considerably darker sitting underneath all of this that the industry does not like to discuss at its nicer events. When monetization depends on avoiding difficult topics, the financial incentive to soften coverage becomes very real. To sidestep important but complicated reporting. To sand down the edges of journalism that somebody somewhere might find uncomfortable enough to trigger a blocklist. Some researchers are already calling this a direct threat to media integrity. We would call it something simpler: an enormously expensive mistake the industry keeps consciously choosing to repeat because the people choosing it are not the ones paying for it.

The smarter tools exist. The data is not ambiguous. The publishers are paying for everyone else's inertia and their patience, any reasonable observer would note, expired some time ago.

In ADOTAT+, we go considerably deeper: the specific vendors, the actual performance data from controlled unblocking tests, which agency holding groups are furthest behind, and what the realistic path to change actually looks like, including a frank assessment of exactly who is standing in the way of it and why.

ADOTAT+ is where we go into the room with the door closed. Specific vendor evaluations with actual performance data. Which sales houses are returning real value to publishers and which ones are quietly extracting it. The curation margins your SSP partners would prefer you never asked about.

The first-party data activation platforms worth evaluating right now versus the ones with beautiful pitch decks and no production customers. The embeddings vendors delivering those 40 to 70% CTR lifts and what implementation actually costs. The agentic buying infrastructure being built right now that will determine which publishers get spend and which ones get skipped entirely. The wrapper technology decisions that look tactical and are actually strategic. We talked to dozens of people across this ecosystem who told us things they would not say on a panel. That intelligence is in ADOTAT+.

The publishers who are pulling away from the field right now share exactly one characteristic: they are operating on better information than their competitors. Not bigger budgets. Not larger teams. Better information, applied faster, with more specificity than the industry's public conversation ever provides. The gap between what is being discussed openly in this industry and what is actually being decided in the rooms that matter is, at this particular moment in publishing history, larger than it has ever been. The floor fell out of the old model and the people who knew it was coming built something new before it happened. ADOTAT+ exists for the publishers, operators, and investors who intend to be in that group. The ones who read the public version and wonder what they are missing already know the answer.