Over the past year I have formed an intimate relationship and level of understanding with the Internet that I never thought possible. I started with Trust Metrics as an expert scorer adding human ratings to our existing models. Viewing as many as 600 websites a day prompted me to declare myself an expert on all content of the web.

I am no longer a part of the human scoring process, but I continue to work with the computer-generated rating reports my scoring helped create. Now I get to view websites with the benefit of already having model outputs in hand. Working on the back end has given me an even better understanding of our product and what to look for when evaluating the Internet. Perhaps more importantly, it gives me access to sortable data and end of year totals.

It has been a busy January reporting some of the things we learned in our first year of ratings. We have been featured in MediaPost’s Metrics Insider and DigiDay. However, I want to take a little more time explaining the data we collected, because I think this data reflects where our industry stands and where it is headed.

This is a the first post of a three part series detailing and providing examples of the state of the online inventory. The study was based on two samples of 50k+ sites from our 500k+ database. The database is comprised of site lists we have collected from various sources throughout the year and sites we have added for scoring and other purposes.

Safety and Non-English

The good news: Safety, which up to this point has been the driving force behind a large portion of ad tech, is less of a problem than I imagined (having seen the things I’ve seen). Only about 9% of sites had safety issues surrounding profanity, pornography, hate speech or violence. Even better, there are countless technologies designed to avoid safety concerns that have made avoidance of this content common, simple and automatic. In other words, what little unsafe content continues to exist on the in ad inventories easily avoidable through the use well-known technology.

The bad: My focus today is on the one quality issue that outweighs all safety issues combined. Non-English sites made up just under 10% of the sites we looked at – more than the four most prominent and concerning safety issues combined. That includes German, French, Spanish, Serbian, Hindi, and Chinese speaking sites, to name a few.

Non-English sites certainly aren’t as toxic as the content flagged for safety reasons. They probably won’t damage a brand, but it’s hard to think of a common scenario where an English ad on a Hindi site would result in a positive action. It’s just pure waste.

This is one of the many issues that underlines the often ignored issue of quality – not safety. Safety is the loud, obnoxious brand killer that is impossible to miss. Quality is death by a thousand (million) missed impressions, because every impression on a non-English site is a missed opportunity to be in an effective environment.

Take a look for yourself. How much value do you see in these impressions?