There is an ongoing effort in Connected TV to clean up the supply chain. Much of that effort has taken the form of subjecting resellers to heightened scrutiny, privileging certain endpoints and collapsing supply into a smaller number of proprietary pipes. The underlying assumption is that complexity itself is the problem.
But complexity is not what has made the CTV supply chain difficult to trust. The problem is that the industry lacks a reliable way to represent these intricacies clearly and consistently.
This is a transparency problem and, more specifically, an ads.txt problem. If ads.txt evolves to reflect how CTV supply actually works, the industry has a more equitable and durable way to establish trust in the supply chain.
Eliminating complexity is not the answer
CTV is complicated for a reason. To maximize both scale and profitability, many publishers work with a variety of platforms (both content and technology) to monetize their inventory via inventory sharing agreements, buybacks, backfill agreements, audience extension deals and monetization agreements structured to help offset the costs associated with producing and distributing content.
These arrangements introduce complexity, but they also make participation in the CTV market possible in the first place. Attempts to force simplicity onto this picture don’t capture the reality of CTV monetization. Instead, they ignore the real problem: The mechanism for communicating the purpose of each participant in the supply chain is broken.
Even complicated supply chains can be navigated if they are transparent and navigable. It begins with finding a more accurate way to reflect how inventory is distributed, monetized and made accessible at scale. That starts with ads.txt.
The shortcomings of ads.txt in a CTV market
Ads.txt was designed as a representation layer. It was originally intended as a kind of contract, a transparent digital record indicating who is authorized to purchase from whom. But it was designed for a market with relatively clear ownership and linear selling paths. Those assumptions no longer hold in CTV.
Today, CTV publishers operate across multiple platforms and distribution environments, with monetization rights that are often shared, delegated or time-bound. Multiple partners may be authorized to sell the same inventory under different conditions. These are standard CTV arrangements, but ads.txt has limited ability to distinguish between them.
As a result, materially different relationships are frequently represented in the same way. Buyers are left to infer intent, and platforms apply their own interpretation logic. The same supply can clear in one buying system and fail in another without any change in the underlying relationship.
The good news is, these are relatively easy problems to solve.
How to update Ads.txt for CTV
There are three main ways that ads.txt can be improved to help restore trust in CTV pipes.
1. Expand and standardize the taxonomy. Ads.txt should allow publishers to declare the different roles their partners play in monetizing inventory.
Ownership, inventory management, technology enablement, ad operations, content distribution, audience extension and marketplace monetization are distinct functions in CTV. Without adequate taxonomy to describe these different relationships, buyers are forced to interpret the same labels differently.
When taxonomy loses its descriptive power, it erodes confidence in what it is meant to describe and creates potential for misuse. This is what has happened with inventorypartnerdomain, which awkwardly stands in for a diverse range of real relationships and thus is interpreted and valued differently depending on the context.
An expanded taxonomy, consistent from the point of declaration to the moment it is read, would eliminate this confusion and help restore confidence in the supply chain.
2. Support concurrent and delegated selling authority. The expanded taxonomy of ads.txt should explicitly accommodate the reality that CTV inventory is often sold through multiple authorized paths at once.
Shared inventory, delegated monetization and limited-scope selling rights can be declared without flattening those arrangements or implying exclusivity. A situation with multiple authorized sellers should be treated as the normal state, not an edge case.
3. Allow publishers to signal preference in addition to authorization. Beyond basic authorization, publishers should be able to designate preferred or trusted buying relationships. This does not remove authorization from other partners but adds a publisher-controlled signal that reflects specific relationships of trust, transparency and commercial alignment, making existing prioritization visible rather than implicit.
We must define the ads.txt and sellers.json specifications as clearly and robustly as any other technical standard used across our industry. We have to ensure they are directly integrated into the OpenRTB specification. If implemented this way, these changes would turn ads.txt into a representation layer that matches how CTV monetization actually functions.
Buyers would gain clearer inputs for evaluating supply paths. Publishers would gain a way to declare their commercial reality directly, on their own terms, in a shared language. Trust becomes something the system can support, rather than something we pursue through collapsing the supply chain into a narrow set of pipes.
Trust and complexity are not mutually exclusive. By standardizing and expanding how complexity is represented, we can build trust into the fabric of the supply chain itself.
“On TV & Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video.
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