The Worst Place To Show An Ad

February 14th, 2025

As seen on AdExchanger

People use the internet to do illegal things and commit crimes. But as an industry, we don’t expect that ads will be served against this type of material.

But when Adalytics looked at historical crawling sessions of a URL bot, it discovered that some of the images on a hosting service, with ads right next to them, were of CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material). The authorities were alerted, and multiple government organizations are investigating these crimes and finding the children in these images.

On this week’s podcast, we turn to another investigation – why these ads showed up against this content. Is brand safety inherently imperfect? Or is there a better way?

To dive into these questions, we bring on Adalytics founder Krzysztof Franaszek as a guest. He unpacks his latest findings, which rose to the attention of Senators Marsha Blackburn and Richard Blumenthal. In an open letter, they notified Amazon, Google, Integral Ad Science, DoubleVerify, the MRC and TAG that they served or certified ads on pages that hosted CSAM content.

We discuss why this content could have slipped through brand safety provider safeguards, based on our technical knowledge of the platforms. Plus, a select few DSPs and SSPs avoided serving ads on the illegal content altogether. The Trade Desk, Kargo, Basis Technologies and TrustX didn’t serve any ads on this material. Kargo, for one, said it had blocked the entire URL two years ago. Instead of using tech to make case-by-case judgments, ad tech companies can block an entire URL, especially because this site was already on a list of known domains that had hosted this type of explicit content.

But blocking a domain limits scale. And programmatic buyers love scale and low cost. Therein lies the industry’s great challenge.