Rupert Murdoch seeks to dent Google's ad dominance

The advertisers can use it to keep ads from appearing in controversial places

Google’s pain may be Rupert Murdoch’s gain. Murdoch’s News Corp is introducing a new service to ensure online ads don’t appear next to fake news or offensive videos, marking the latest salvo in the billionaire media mogul’s long battle with the world’s biggest search engine.
 
News Corp’s Storyful unit, which filters through the firehose of social media for publishers and brands, will track websites known as purveyors of fake news or extremist content and share that list with advertisers, who can use it to keep ads from appearing in controversial places. It’s pitched as a full blockade against content that’s anathema to marketers, arriving as the two biggest forces in online ads — Alphabet’s Google and Facebook Inc — face pressure for failing to offer such tools.

 
Google, in particular, has taken heat for its video offering. Several major advertisers stopped spending on YouTube last month over concern their ads could appear next to offensive videos. Google introduced controls to mitigate the problem, yet rivals are trying to exploit the issue. Storyful’s new service will focus on “video brand safety,” executives said.
 

“This will be one way to give advertisers peace of mind,” Storyful Chief Executive Officer Rahul Chopra said in an interview.
 
Ad-buyer GroupM and marketing firm Weber Shandwick will be the first two companies to use the Storyful database. News Corp will work with Moat, the analytics company recently acquired by Oracle Corp, and the City University of New York School of Journalism to maintain the list of controversial website domains. The database will be free, though Storyful eventually wants to provide a service to help advertisers decide where to place ads.

 
Chopra said Storyful, which News Corp. bought in 2013, is working not just on compiling a list of controversial websites, but on identifying how such content spreads online to stop it earlier. He wants to “choke the money supply to people spreading content like this.”
 
News Corp is the latest company seeking to capitalise on the advertiser boycott of Google’s YouTube. And it’s been nudging its way into the conversation about digital advertising that’s increasingly being dominated by Google and Facebook. WPP Plc CEO Martin Sorrell told financial news site Cheddar recently that clients of his company, the world’s largest ad agency, spend most of their budgets with Google, Murdoch’s media empire — including News Corp and 21st Century Fox  — and Facebook, in that order.