The Telegraph, Guardian News & Media and News UK have announced a joint business that will provide a "brand safe" and "fraud free" place for advertisers.

The Ozone Project, which will launch this autumn, has been developed in response to growing industry concerns about reliability and safety in digital advertising.

The joint platform will serve as a single portal, giving advertisers access to the publishers' combined audience of more than 39.4m users, and will help to fund quality journalism, the companies behind the project said.

It will cover The Telegraph's digital properties, as well as The Guardian and News UK titles The Sun and The Times.

The announcement, made at the Cannes Lions advertising festival in France, will allow advertisers to use their own data along with publishers' audiences. The companies said this would allow for accurate and transparent advertising placement. Each publisher will continue to employ their own sales teams.

The companies plan to open up The Ozone Project to other quality publishers over time.

They said the platform had been developed "in response to industry-wide concerns across the digital advertising ecosystem around brand safety, data governance, lack of transparency in the supply chain and ad fraud". Advertisers had also called for a single place to reach news publishers' audiences.

"Funding quality journalism is essential for the good of the media industry and society as a whole. The Ozone Project puts in place an infrastructure that creates a better marketplace for advertisers, consumers and publishers alike," said Dora Michail, The Telegraph's managing director of digital.