Black List

A blacklist is a list of blocked traffic sources, placements, sites, apps, IP ranges, or user segments explicitly excluded from a campaign. It's the negative filter of media buying: anything on the list never receives impressions or gets its clicks discarded. Blacklists exist at every level — placement blacklists inside a DSP, publisher blacklists at a CPA network, IP blacklists in a tracker or cloaker.

Building blacklists is core daily work on pop, push, and native traffic: launch broad, let placement-level data accumulate, then cut every zone that spends without converting. A mature campaign might blacklist the majority of a network's inventory and remain profitable purely on what survives. The pitfall is cutting too early on thin data — blacklisting a placement after two conversionless clicks throws away zones that simply hadn't reached statistical volume yet.