ads.txt

When it comes to managing fraud, there are four steps CTV publishers should take to remove bad actors from the supply chain.

Traffic-starved publishers are hopeful that their long-undervalued audience data will fuel advertising’s automated future – if only they can finally wrest control of the industry narrative away from ad tech middlemen.

The era of fragmented, adversarial ad tech is winding down. A new paradigm is emerging defined by AI-first, end-to-end platforms and collaboration among buyers and sellers.

Many well-intentioned advertising standards efforts gather digital dust thanks to industry politics and competing interests. Here’s how the industry can stop sabotaging its own progress.

The curation debate is missing a critical piece: standardized reporting. Without it, curation risks leaving publishers in the dark about its actual value.

PubMatic CEO Rajeev Goel dishes on sell-side curation, data fees, how the business model differs from buy-side curation and how publishers can control pricing for curated deals.

The first half of this decade has left publishers reeling from a pandemic jab and an AI uppercut that rearranged our reality and knocked us to our knees. Here’s how pubs and their ad tech partners can punch back in the years ahead.

Solutions that fundamentally address the issues curation attempts to solve already exist. The problem is that none of these solutions have been adopted by the buy side.

Transparency is making its way into CTV bid requests, including supply source, content genre and, increasingly, show-level transparency. According to Rob Hazan, senior director of streaming TV product at Index Exchange, the right amount of transparency could make the open exchange a viable place for CTV ad budgets.

What happens when you get a bunch of smart, technical, pissed off publishers and SSPs in one room? Here are some of the spicier things AdExchanger overheard at the inaugural Prebid Summit.

On Monday, Scope3 made its carbon emissions data open to the public so anyone can understand which players are doing well (or not) with their carbon footprint.

The proposal to transition ads.txt into ads.json comes with some major problems, and its benefits can be largely achieved in a far simpler way – by reformatting existing ads.txt files.

Armed with Ads.txt and Sellers.json files, Nandini Jammi, co-founder of Check My Ads Institute, spends her days exposing how money flows through the twisted pipes of the programmatic supply chain. Her goal? To defund disinformation, toxic content and hate online.

The current model for ads.txt isn’t helping the industry understand how publishers are working with sellers and resellers, writes Rotem Shaul, co-CEO of Primis.

You can’t have supply path optimization (SPO) without supply chain transparency. The ads.txt version 1.1 update released in April added OWNERDOMAIN and MANAGERDOMAIN variables that allow publishers to label a site’s parent company and the intermediary that is selling a site’s ad inventory. The IAB Tech Lab’s Jill Wittkopp spoke to AdExchanger about how these supply chain transparency tools relate to the industry’s pursuit of SPO.

As technology and industry self-regulation converge to make supply and demand path optimization more seamless and efficient, we need a better name to describe optimization across the advertising ecosystem, writes Stephen Johnston, CTO of PubWise. “I’d like to submit for your consideration a new term: advertising logistics.”

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Google’s Pub Crawl Ads.txt was created to identify and help prevent fraud or non-transparent dealings in programmatic. But ads.txt also helps to quantify Google’s ad tech footprint.  Of the top one million sites that carry the ads.txt spec and are tracked by Well-Known, an […]

Connected TV may be the media industry’s shiniest new toy, but it’s not squeaky clean – it’s rife with ad fraud, and high CPMs only make the channel a better target for con artists. Several industry execs discussed why the industry’s best shot is to increase transparency as much as possible across the bid stream at IAB Tech Lab’s Transcend summit.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Long Live Linear On Friday, Innovid reported its second quarterly earnings since the company went public in December and its first since closing its acquisition of TV measurement provider TVSquared earlier this year. Innovid’s revenue grew 44% YoY to $25.9 million. Excluding TVSquared, Innovid […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Take Rate Takeaways The fees collected by intermediaries in the ad supply chain vary widely, according to new research from consulting firm Adalytics. On one extreme, they could leave publishers collecting as little as 2% of a buyer’s bid price, Morning Brew reports.  […]

The IAB designed the sellers.json specification to follow the money – but the spec has its own limitations that require hygiene practices and general maintenance for accuracy. What’s more, just because an entry exists on sellers.json does not mean inventory is available to buyers, writes Eric Bozinny, senior director of marketplace quality at PubMatic.

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Lior Shvo, Managing Director at Sellers.guide. It’s not rocket science: Advertisers want to reach the right audience, at the right time, at the right price. Here’s the thing, though: Doing that is waaaay too […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The OOH F.U. ROI Macy’s is suing its landlord, the Kaufman Organization, to prevent the building owner from placing an Amazon billboard above the department chain’s flagship Herald Square location in New York City. Macy’s has had its own brand on the billboard for […]

“On TV & Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. The words we use matter. Last month, for example, the Media Rating Council recategorized the term “over-the-top” as “connected TV,” which is what most people in the industry mean when they refer to streaming. The distinction is important, because it helps buyers […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. SPAC Attack Mobile gaming monetization and ad tech provider IronSource began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday via a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), with the goal of raising $2 billion in capital at an $11 billion valuation. The IPO comes […]

The idea behind Ads.txt was simple: publishers create a public list containing the names of all the partners they work with, and buyers check that list before they buy. But even the simplest of ideas can get complicated when they go from paper to reality. Some publishers just said “yes” to every request to add […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. New Specifications The IAB Tech Lab is rolling out new specs, this time for the buy-side, around transparency and brand safety: big topics of conversation these days. IAB has released two new technology standards — buyers.json and DemandChain Object — that are open for […]

Programmatic advertising used to be an afterthought for The Associated Press. AP, the largest and oldest newswire service in the US, makes the majority of its revenue through a subscription fee that news organizations pay for to access vetted content. But there’s no reason why an entity founded in 1846 can’t also optimize its supply […]

“The Sell Sider” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Paul Roberts, founder and interim CEO of Kubient. Ads.txt was an ambitious initiative spearheaded by the IAB to clean up the digital ad supply chain and help publishers list the […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Paul Bannister, co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at CafeMedia. Ads.txt has been a standard for several years now and has become something that we take for granted. That’s a good thing, as it speaks to […]