Australian advertisers' keyword blocklists are blocking safe, high-attention news to dodge a risk that is mostly imaginary. New research puts A$180 million of news advertising at risk. Filip Ivankovic on why the list is a liability, and what to do about it.
A list built to avoid the news does not avoid risk. It avoids attention, then charges you for the privilege.
The Take: Your blocklist is not protecting your brand. It is a liability dressed as caution. A blunt keyword list built to swerve the news walls your advertising off from where Australians are actually paying attention, and books the loss as prudence.
How much reach are you actually blocking?
An audit of 1,200 Australian news articles found 57% carried at least one term capable of triggering an exclusion list. More than half the news you avoid was safe to run beside.
That figure comes from ThinkNewsBrands, whose audit of 1,200 Australian news articles across July 2025 to June 2026 found 57% tripped an exclusion list. The same study found 38% of lower-sensitivity stories were wrongly excluded, meaning a large share of the news you swerve carried no real risk to your brand at all.
Look at what actually triggered the blocks. Sport made up a third of the excluded articles. The single most frequent trigger word was "Victoria", a state, not a scandal. "Paris" lingered on exclusion lists for years after 2015, quietly blocking travel features, fashion coverage and Olympics reporting long after the reason had passed.
Mumbrella reported that words as innocuous as "game", "joint" and "hard" would have knocked out Australian Open coverage under standard keyword filters. Your tennis sponsorship, blocked by the word game.
Read the bottom row against the top. You are switching off the environment where two in three readers are fully or mostly focused, more than 20 percentage points ahead of creator content, to dodge a risk that 38% of the time was never there.
What does a keyword list actually cost you?
The bill is not abstract. ThinkNewsBrands puts about A$180 million of annual news advertising at risk from these lists, and roughly 23 million potential ad interactions a year going missing.
Australian news advertising a year at risk of being blocked by keyword lists
Set that against the size of the market. Australian internet advertising reached A$18.4 billion in 2025, up 11.5% on the year, with video now 29% of spend. Money is pouring into digital, and a slice of it is being spent to actively avoid the most engaged readers in the country.
Only one in three marketers feels confident their brand-safety system places appropriately within news. That is not caution. That is a control most buyers cannot see, set once and rarely reviewed, quietly deciding where their money is allowed to go.
Why does this keep happening?
Because the list feels responsible. It is easier to defend a blanket block to a nervous board than to explain context-level buying. A keyword list looks like defence. It reads like prudence on a slide. The cost rarely shows up as a line item, so few people question it.
In our benchmarking of Australian businesses, the weakest point is rarely the creative. It is the settings behind the buy that few teams revisit. The block list gets written once at setup, then inherited from campaign to campaign like furniture few people want to move.
Mi3 put the same case plainly this week, arguing that trusted journalism is not a brand risk and blocking it is. I agree. The risk you are managing is mostly imaginary. The reach you are losing is real and measurable.
What I would do about it
Stop blocking by keyword alone. A word out of context tells you close to nothing about whether a page is safe for your brand.
Audit the block list on a schedule. Put a date in the calendar every quarter and read the list line by line. "Paris" and "Victoria" should not survive a single review.
Move to page-level and context-level controls. Judge the individual page and its surrounding context, not a term that could appear in a match report or a travel guide.
Buy trusted news on purpose. Treat quality journalism as an environment you want to be in, not a category you avoid by default. Attention is the scarce asset, and this is where it lives.
A quick note on the methodology behind that view. We score Australian media buys on setup quality, context controls and reach lost to blunt exclusions, framed directionally rather than as a league table, using current 2026 benchmarking. You can read the method at how we score.
The opinion, stated plainly
This is my read, not a rule handed down from a platform. Brand safety as most Australian advertisers run it has drifted from protecting the brand to avoiding the news, and the two are not the same thing. A keyword list that blocks a third of sport and the word "Victoria" is not managing risk. It is managing appearances, and charging you reach for the comfort.
Audit the list this quarter. If you want a second set of eyes on the settings behind your buy, see how we pressure-test an Australian media buy.
Frequently asked questions
Is brand safety a waste of time?
No. Protecting your brand from genuinely harmful content is sound. The waste is the blunt keyword list that blocks safe, high-attention news along with the rare risky page. The tool is the issue, not the intent.
Will buying news put my brand next to bad stories?
Page-level and context-level controls let you buy the trusted environment while still skipping the individual pages you would rather avoid. You keep the attention without the blanket ban that costs you reach.
How often should I review my exclusion list?
Quarterly at least. Terms like "Paris" and "Victoria" survive for years because few teams read the list after setup. A short scheduled review catches the words that block far more than they protect.
Is news advertising actually worth it?
The audit found two in three news readers fully or mostly focused while reading, well ahead of creator content. If attention is what you are paying for, trusted news is one of the stronger buys available in the Australian market.