Curated News from TheGuardian.com on January 20, 2020
UK newspaper and magazine publishers lost almost £170m in digital revenue last year as technology designed to stop advertisements from appearing next to hard-hitting content, such as shootings and terrorism, also inadvertently blocked them from appearing in some of the most popular stories of the year.
Publishers found many articles related to some of the most well read and therefore commercially valuable stories of the year – on topics ranging from the Rugby World Cup to Game of Thrones – shorn of advertising.
When advertisers run digital campaigns they use keyword exclusion list – stocked with trigger words such as “attack”, “death” and “sex” – that automatically stop ads running in potentially problematic stories that feature them.