(Don’t) Keep Calm; Fight Ad Fraud Now!
If you are an advertiser who has lost sleep over your ads showing on brand unsafe content or a website owner (a.k.a publisher) who is worried about losing precious advertising revenue to spoofed domains, it’s time for you and your tech team to prioritize ads.txt.
What is ads.txt, again?
It’s an IAB approved text file that will give you a list of sellers who are authorized to sell a publisher’s inventory. Check it out for yourself -
Go to www.nytimes.com > Type /ads.txt at the end of the URL i.e. http://www.nytimes.com/ads.txt. > You’ll see a list of ad tech companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, OpenX, etc. This is nothing but a comprehensive list of all the Authorized Digital Sellers* who can sell or resell NYTimes’ inventory.
As of Nov 1, 2017, only 44% of the Alexa top 10,000 websites have implemented ads.txt
Dear Seller/Publisher,
Do you crave for transparency and don’t want to lose your precious ad $s to counterfeit inventory sellers? If your answer is yes, well then, you need to get started with uploading the ads.txt file on your server asap!
We get that it’s holiday season and your tech team is already working hard on hitting the end of year OKRs but apparently many publishers have reported that this exercise doesn’t take more than a few hours! Here’s a quick checklist-
- Go to google.com and read up on how to create and declare this list of authorized sellers. I found this step by step guide in 0.63 seconds of doing a quick search. Thank you, Google!
- [IMPORTANT]If you have an ads.txt file, pls ensure the list is up-to-date as Google will soon block any unauthorized vendors not listed in this file.
- If there’s an implementation error or a missing item, you’re likely to miss out on advertising revenue as the unlisted yet otherwise authorized digital sellers won’t be able to sell your inventory as promised
Dear Buyer/DSP (Demand Side Platform),
In the last few weeks, major programmatic players such Google’s Doubleclick Bid Manager, The Trade Desk etc have announced their plans to start using ads.txt (effective immediately) to block illegitimate sellers.
MediaMath, Adobe Advertising Cloud (formerly TubeMogul), DataXu & many other ad tech players are fighting ad fraud using ads.txt and already road map for implementing similar ads.txt filters over the next few months.
It’s your turn to get started.
Act Now!
“With the major [DSPs] forcing an ultimatum, it’s the watershed moment for ads.txt,” said Dan de Sybel, CTO of programmatic agency Infectious Media. “SSPs will now need to get their act together.” — Source Digiday
While the ads.txt initiative is not going to end the scourge of domain spoofing right away, we know for sure that along the way we are weeding out some bad, unwanted & illegitimate players from the advertising value chain!
With the publisher side and the DSP side joining forces to implement this industry approved initiative, I am confident that in the long run this program will yield more returns than we’ve imagined.
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*Fun fact: If you’re a late bloomer like me or still haven’t guessed this- “ads” in ads.txt stands for Authorized Digital Sellers not advertisements. It’s a concept inspired from robots.txt (or robot exclusion protocol) used by websites to communicate with crawlers and robots on the web.
Enjoy!
