Earlier this year, IAB Tech Lab introduced the new standard of programmatic security - ads.txt. Authorised Digital Resellers project was designed to increase transparency of the digital ecosystem, eliminate ad fraud and promote trust between buyers and sellers.
Despite these positive benefits, the process of ads.txt adoption had been incredibly slow: within two months of the specification release, only 34 premium publishers out of top 500 sites have uploaded ads.txt files, according to the report by MarTech Today. It became clear that publishers simply did not hurry to accept new global standard.
Google decided not to wait long and pushed the idea forward. At EMEA Partner Summit that took place in Dublin on October 7th, company’s representatives announced that Google will stop supporting ad transactions without ads.txt authorization starting this month.
This means that both Google AdX and AdSense will only work with publishers that have officially released the list of authorized sellers and resellers of their inventory. Ads.txt file must be hosted on the root level of each publisher’s domain. This file must be publically available, and accessible to the general public.
Mandatory ad.txt implementation concerns all publishers, without acceptance, even those with reliable traffic and premium placements. Such tightening of rules within programmatic ecosystem leads to radical changes in a way online inventory is bought and sold.
SmartyAds supports the ads.txt initiative and believes that wide adoption of the new standard can solve problems of the domain spoofing and other fraudulent activities once and for all. Want to create ads.txt? Contact us at publishers@smartyads.com and receive a manual on how to compose an ads.txt file, what fields to include and how to post it to your domain.
P.S. You are welcome to check our article about ads.txt technology, its benefits, and implementation here.
