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IAB Content Taxonomy v3

Mon 16 January 2023

We're pleased to announce classification support for the newest version of the IAB Content Taxonomy - v3.

TextRazor supports classification to taxonomies from the Internet Advertising Bureau and the IPTC. Until recently neither had changed much since we added them in 2017, so our IAB classifiers have been locked to the IAB v2 "Machine-readable" taxonomy and older IAB QAG.

In June 2022 this changed when IAB finalized v3, which includes a number of notable updates to v2:

  • New taxonomy nodes. v3 has been updated to include "Remote Working" and other categories that have become relevant in the past few years.

  • IAB v2.2 introduced "Brand Safety" categories to the Content Taxonomy. These include Sensitive Topics such as "Sensitive Social Issues", "Obscenity", "Arms & Ammunition". We've had a lot of interest in brand safety categories over the past few years but it has taken us some time to tackle this tricky problem. Brand Safety is inherently subjective, so we have been careful to make our solution useful in the general case.

  • The taxonomy has been subtly rearranged and simplified. For example, "News and Politics>Crime" has been moved to "Crime". We have found these top-level changes better reflect our user's content - generally a "Crime" category is important, but not all "Crime" documents are News in particular. Similarly, the entertainment categories have been simplified - "Horror" is now a more general "Genre", previously this existed only under the "Movies" node, making a distinction between other forms of media that isn't generally very useful.

We are committed to supporting both the existing and new taxonomies going forward, so there is no rush to upgrade. V3 is a good default for new IAB projects, but if these particular changes aren't important to you there's no reason not to continue using V2. The Taxonomy Ids and labels are compatible between the two, so if you do decide to upgrade it shouldn't cause much disruption.

We have also added support for v2.2, which is an incremental upgrade for users who need to preserve compatibility with the existing v2 IDs - a number of our users need interoperability with third party systems that are unlikely to upgrade versions soon.

You can find the full taxonomy at the IAB.

The full list of IAB options is therefore textrazor_iab, textrazor_iab_content_taxonomy, textrazor_iab_content_taxonomy_2.2, textrazor_iab_content_taxonomy_3.0. You can try them out now in the "classifiers" field of your TextRazor requests.