Exclusions and restrictions
Sensitive topic exclusions
As part of our commitment to a brand safe environment, Apple News analyzes all content across sensitive topic areas. Apple’s robust Classification Engine analyzes articles, tags them with keywords, and assigns topics to each article based on contextual relevance. When an article is tagged with a sensitive topic, it’s removed from the pool of articles eligible for ad serving.
Channel-level settings
Publishers can choose to open up their ad inventory across 13 of the 16 sensitive topics by updating their Ad Settings in Workbench. In order to open up sensitive topic inventory for direct sold, house, or backfill ads, the publisher must de-select them in Ad Settings. Three topics are restricted from advertising, as noted below. Per Apple policy, ads cannot run in articles tagged as restricted content.
Note that any changes made in Ad Settings can take up to three weeks to be reflected in inventory forecasting. In order for backfill ads to run in sensitive content, reseller campaign opt-in is required and the publisher must have backfill ads in sensitive topics opened up. Refer to Ad backfill settings for more details.
Line-level settings
When booking either house or direct sold campaigns, publishers can exclude sensitive topics at the line level, providing additional brand safety controls. To learn more about Sensitive Topics using Workbench, refer to Set up targeting. For publishers using Google Ad Manager, refer to Targeting dimensions.
Exclude ads from articles by category
There are two ways to exclude ads from displaying on your Apple News channel(s):
Exclude by Campaign categories: Within Ad settings on Workbench, you can select from a list of categories that you don’t want to appear in your channel. For example, you can choose to exclude any automotive advertising in your channel. This exclusion option is only applicable for any backfill ads flowing through to your channel and only applies to the campaign category level. You can’t exclude specific advertisers.
Exclude by key-value pairs. Refer to Exclude ads for ANF articles using key-value pairs for more details.