In today’s advertising landscape, quality isn’t just a buzzword. Inventory standards are stricter than ever, designed to align with the increasingly demanding expectations of advertisers and agencies. Publishers across the web are seeing more content and traffic blocked by demand partners than in years past, not because their sites have changed, but because advertiser requirements have.
Every impression now faces greater scrutiny, as brands prioritize premium, brand-safe environments where their ads can appear with confidence. This is why Freestar is committed to working with all of our publishers to continually meet the requirements of our premium demand partners. We only win when you do, which is why many Freestar services focus on quality improvements.
Why Now?
Advertisers care more about brand safety and brand suitability than ever before. They ultimately decide which sites or types of content best align with their brand. The SSPs and DSPs share the responsibilities of enforcing the advertiser’s request for brand-safe sites. The number of web domains available to choose from has increased exponentially as the number of websites has exploded from tens of millions to over a billion in just ten years.
“Globally, we’ve observed that buy-side platforms (DSPs) are seeking more direct connections to their supply sources, and that comes with the additional supply quality moderation work one might normally expect a SSP to do. Their approach to moderation tends to be a bit different from an SSP’s approach, as the DSP is more directly beholden to advertisers. Advertisers leverage many different brand-safety tools, and often tie payment terms to a KPI sourced from those tools. A DSP’s decision to block can often stem from this advertiser-provided reporting, and the reason doesn’t always get passed along to the seller. It could be that a few pages have naughty language, or maybe it’s a user-level flag that the publisher has little control over. ”
Rocky Moss | Founder, Deepsee
For publishers, this shift means maintaining high-quality inventory is essential to protect and maximize revenue. Advertisers have their own thresholds for brand suitability and may even maintain exclusive domain lists for where their ads are allowed to deliver. To maximize advertiser spend on your inventory, we need your help in ensuring your website is a safe place for brands to display their creatives.
We’re confident that as we work together, publishers will stay eligible for the widest range of campaigns.
Understanding Common Advertiser Guidelines
Every advertiser, ad agency, SSP, and DSP partner has their own set of policies around what they’re willing to monetize, published to align with the requirements of advertisers. To support this, Freestar has similar guidelines that we require of our publishers to monetize. Regardless of the nuances, standards for brand suitability largely fall into three areas: inventory transparency, ad experience, and content guidelines.
- The Role of Inventory Transparency in Building Trust
Inventory transparency is essential for building trust with advertisers. It gives them confidence in where their ads appear and reduces the risk of brand safety issues. When publishers maintain clear, accurate, and honest inventory labeling, they are protecting partner relationships.
As your ad partner, we advise (and require) our publishers to have a live and crawlable ads.txt per the IAB Tech Lab specification. There are specific rules for ads.txt regarding OWNERDOMAIN and MANAGERDOMAIN to ensure the transparency buyers are seeking. Our teams also work to ensure that publishers don’t accidentally block demand partner crawlers in ads.txt or robots.txt.
- Optimizing the Ad Experience for Higher Value
Fewer ads on the page lead to a better user experience and better long-term revenue outcomes for the publisher. This year, we’ve worked with over 200 publishers on ad layout optimizations to lower ad density, improve viewability, and other metrics that send positive signals to advertisers.
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- Ad refreshes should occur only when the ad is in view, and once every 30 seconds.
- Ad units should reflect 70% viewability or higher.
- Ad density should be no higher than 30%. With both video and display, there must be more content than ads.
- Only one video ad unit can play on a page at a time.
- Ads should not obscure, replace, or cover other ads or content.
- Ads should not disrupt user navigation.
- Navigating Content Guidelines for Brand Safety
Advertisers typically want to avoid being placed near sensitive content categories. By avoiding certain types of content, publishers improve their share of PMP and direct-sold campaigns and retain access to premium demand.
Examples of content that should not be monetized with ads include sexually explicit text or images, weapons or content promoting violence, unmoderated forums / UGC, hate speech, profanity, illegal drugs/alcohol, content promoting terrorism, sensitive social issues, and misinformation.
User-generated content poses such a significant risk to advertisers that certain demand partners now block that supply. Freestar requires moderation of all monetized UGC and will work with you to find a moderation partner if you need one.
Forums, comment sections, user profile pages, article submissions, and community discussions are all examples of user-generated content that should be moderated.
UGC also includes anything a user can upload, such as images, videos, or music. With the rise of interactive tools, it now includes chat systems, AI content creation, and any platform feature that allows users to input or generate material.
How Premium Inventory Directly Boosts Revenue
We make it our goal for every advertiser to be spending across the Freestar network of publishers. Each month, we meet with the Marketplace Quality teams of our top demand partners, highlighting our top publishers, and working through domain blocks in order to consistently achieve this.
We know that factors like content standards, site layout, ad density, and viewability all influence whether a page is desirable for advertiser dollars. Advertisers are willing to pay more for placements they can trust to reflect well on their brand, which means that higher-quality inventory not only attracts more premium demand but also consistently earns stronger CPMs.
Freestar’s Proactive Framework for Quality Assurance
Freestar’s approach to quality is designed to protect publishers by maintaining the highest standards across our network. Before websites can be monetized, we conduct a comprehensive quality check to ensure it meets all policy and brand safety requirements. If a website doesn’t, we offer reasons as to why and recommendations that will bring them into compliance.
To keep your supply safe, our processes continuously monitor for non-brand-safe content and keywords, and ads are removed from pages that violate guidelines. We also run new scans every month to identify and resolve any quality issues that may have emerged over time. Our customer success team, alongside the publisher, works together to resolve quality issues as they crop up. Once a domain has been blocked by a demand partner, getting it unblocked can be a challenge. We’re here to help prevent that from happening!
We take a proactive, partnership-based approach to site quality, working with leading industry partners – Jounce, Deepsee, Gamera, HUMAN, and OpenSincera – to monitor high-risk inventory quality issues like MFA, content compliance, ad density, and overall ad experience.
These steps ensure that every site in the Freestar network contributes to a safe, transparent, and premium environment that advertisers trust and reward with higher CPMs and stronger demand.
Raising the Bar on Ad Standards Together
Quality is the new competitive advantage. With aligned goals and a focus on the long game, we can ensure every site in our network not only meets the quality expectations of our advertisers but consistently contributes to high campaign performance.
If you’re a publisher currently monetizing with Freestar today and want to discuss what your supply looks like to buyers, reach out to audience@freestar.com today.
