Integral Ad Science (IAS) has partnered with Nextdoor to enhance brand safety and suitability on the platform. IAS will power Nextdoor's first-party brand safety tool, utilizing its AI-driven Total Media Quality product suite. This collaboration aims to provide advertisers with pre-bid Brand Safety and Suitability Optimization, ensuring that ads appear in brand-suitable environments.

IAS's pre-bid Brand Safety and Suitability Optimization employs AI-driven Multimedia Technology, offering advertisers third-party transparency and suitability for their Nextdoor campaigns. Advertisers with managed accounts can now run ads on Nextdoor's Newsfeed, reaching a significant portion of U.S. households, with the assurance that their ads will appear in brand-safe and suitable contexts, based on industry-aligned standards.

Jim Egan, SVP of Business Development of IAS, emphasized the importance of this partnership in bringing deeper transparency and control to advertisers on Nextdoor. By combining IAS's AI technology with Nextdoor's content moderation, brands can achieve enhanced protection and performance in hyperlocal advertising.

IAS's pre-bid Brand Safety and Suitability Optimization for Nextdoor includes:

• Trusted Third-Party Control: Advertisers can apply pre-bid blocking against 12 industry-aligned categories and 4 risk levels.
• Custom, Dynamic Control: Advertisers can avoid unsuitable content based on specific brand needs across mobile and desktop environments in over 90 languages.
• Best-in-class Technology: IAS's AI-driven Multimedia Technology, along with Nextdoor's moderation systems, accurately classifies content at scale through frame-by-frame analysis, combining image, audio, and text signals.

Michael Kiernan, Chief Revenue Officer at Nextdoor, highlighted that trust and community are essential for Nextdoor, making brand safety a priority. The partnership with IAS introduces a new layer of third-party transparency, allowing advertisers to confidently engage with local users.

IAS and Nextdoor plan to expand their partnership with the general availability of Total Media Quality (TMQ) for Nextdoor in H2 2025. TMQ will include Brand Safety & Suitability Measurement, Viewability, and Invalid Traffic Measurement, enabling advertisers to validate content adjacency and maximize campaign spend.

In other news, Reddit is addressing the increasing presence of AI-generated content on its platform. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman believes that the site's competitive advantage lies in the authentic content provided by real people. As the internet becomes saturated with AI, Reddit aims to maintain its unique communities curated by human users.

Traffic to Reddit has grown, partly due to users searching for Reddit posts on Google. Reddit's business model has evolved since its IPO, with increased advertising and deals with OpenAI and Google for AI model training. However, concerns have arisen that Reddit's success may be closely tied to Google Search.

Some Reddit users have reported an influx of AI bots and users relying on tools like ChatGPT to generate posts, which they say is diminishing the quality of the content. Formatting quirks, such as bulleted lists and excessive positivity, often give away AI-generated posts.

Recently, a user flagged a post in r/singularity, suspecting it was an AI-generated account spreading misinformation. Although Reddit investigated and found no evidence of AI involvement in this instance, the company is taking the issue seriously.

Reddit's chief legal officer announced that the company sent legal demands to researchers at the University of Zurich for conducting an unauthorized experiment that flooded a Reddit community with AI bots to study view manipulation. The moderators of r/changemyview criticized the experiment as unethical, noting that the AI engaged in manipulative tactics, including impersonating victims of sensitive issues.

The University of Zurich is investigating the study and has stated that the researchers decided not to publish their findings. The university's Ethics Committee intends to implement stricter review processes for future experimental studies.

Huffman addressed the concerns about AI on Reddit, stating that the company will use third-party services to verify the humanity of new users and ensure that Reddit remains a platform driven by real people. These services will require users to provide more information, including their age. Reddit's automated tools have already been refined to detect and flag suspicious accounts.

Despite these efforts, some Reddit users remain frustrated, citing a proliferation of LLM bots that mimic user behavior and post frequently in certain subreddits.