Brand Safety

Brand safety is the set of measures advertisers and platforms use to keep advertisements from appearing next to objectionable content, the so-called ad-adjacency problem. The concept is codified by industry bodies that define categories of unsafe content and tiers of risk, so that advertisers can decide what kinds of material their ads should never run beside. For any platform built on user-generated content, brand safety is a precondition for attracting major advertisers.

It is a particularly acute challenge for Reddit because advertisements run inside unfiltered conversation spread across more than a hundred thousand communities, where a brand's message can land beside controversial, explicit or harmful discussion. To reassure advertisers, Reddit has built tiered ad-inventory controls that let brands choose how broad a set of communities their ads appear in, community and keyword exclusions, and partnerships with third-party verification firms. Brand safety matters to governance because the commercial need to keep advertising clean creates pressure on content moderation, and recurring controversies over ads appearing beside hateful or graphic material illustrate the tension between an open platform and a saleable one.