Updates to Ads.Txt Aim to Distinguish Owners From Operators

The IAB Tech Lab released a series of new specifications to its ads.txt and sellers.json protocols, the latest effort from the consortium to reduce ad fraud in the digital advertising ecosystem. First introduced in 2017, the ads.txt and sellers.json system acts as a publicly visible ledger that allows anyone to determine who is authorized to sell publishers’ advertising inventory. (To view an ads.txt file, type in the URL of a website and add /ads.txt.) For the system to work, all parties involved in the programmatic supply chain must maintain the documents, which enable anyone to cross-reference the lists of any two partners to confirm that they are licensed to work with one another. The new, optional terminology introduced by the update, the ownerdomain and managerdomain specifications, aims to further distinguish between specific domains, the domain owners and the companies they have chosen to sell their inventory. Seller-Defined Audiences Face Trust Issues in Taming the Open Web In doing so, the IAB Tech Lab hopes to make the ledgers more intelligible to both automated crawlers and to ad operations managers in charge of monetizing websites and protecting against ad fraud, said CafeMedia chief strategy officer Paul Bannister. “Nothing is bullet-proof, but these changes make it easier to give buyers confidence in what they’re doing and help publishers represent their ad-tech partnerships in the right ways,” Bannister said. Bannister, who helped craft the specifications, says the updates will bring more visibility to the ownership aspect of the media ecosystem. But while the protocol has garnered praise for its push toward transparency, the system lacks any method of enforcement, relying only on collective adoption and elective participation. Ownerdomain and managerdomain delineate ownership from ad operation Prior to the new updates, ads.txt and sellers.json files relied primarily on the direct and reseller specifications to indicate whether a publisher was selling its inventory directly or had licensed a vendor to sell it. However, the system failed to reflect the fact that often one company operates multiple domains. For example, Condé Nast owns and monetizes nearly a dozen editorial titles, including Vogue and The New Yorker, an ownership dynamic that puts it at odds with the tidy dichotomy of direct or reseller. Compounding the situation, direct inventory is typically more valuable than reseller inventory, as it is more exclusive. As a result, any error or confusion in the categorization process risked devaluing direct inventory or falsely over-valuing reseller inventory. Ownerdomain and managerdomain aim to resolve these issues by bringing more clarity to the relationship between publishers and their ad monetization partners. Both specifications must live at the top of an ads.txt or sellers.json file, as the information they reveal about the ownership or ad management of a website offers critical context for understanding its supply chain. Ownerdomain allows publishers to clearly state who owns any given domain, while managerdomain indicates when a vendor is not the publisher but is the primary or exclusive seller for a site. The former helps larger publishers like Condé Nast, while the latter helps small and mid-size publishers whose ad inventory is often only available through chosen intermediaries, Bannister said. The managerdomain also helps media buyers understand why supply chains might look different in different countries, as publishers might designate specific ad partners in different regions. To illustrate, a typical ads.txt file has three required components: the domain name of the advertising system, the account ID of the publisher and the type of relationship. An example might look like this: greenadexchange.com, XF7342, DIRECT. If this website wanted to indicate its owner, it could look like this: OWNERDOMAIN=mediacompany.com greenadexchange.com, XF7342, DIRECT If it wanted to indicate its ad manager, it could look like this: OWNERDOMAIN=mediacompany.com MANAGERDOMAIN=yellowmediamanager.com, FRA MANAGERDOMAIN=bluemediamanager.com, USA greenadexchange.com, XF7342, DIRECT The updates are both optional, joining several other optional specifications such as contact (for contact information), subdomain (to point to a subdomain file) and inventorypartnerdomain (primarily for connected television). But publishers interested in communicating their advertising supply chain as clearly as possible to partners will benefit from including as much relevant information as they feel comfortable including, Bannister said. “I am optimistic that these changes will make it easier for media buyers to put in place more and better controls to clean up more of what they buy,” Bannister said.

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New Updates to the Ads.Txt Protocol Aim to Further Distinguish Owners From Operators

The new specifications offer clarity but still lack enforcement

Mark Stenberg

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Mark Stenberg