To Prune Ads.Txt Files, Publishers Are Turning to New Tools

For all its good intentions, the ads.txt protocol introduced by the IAB Tech Lab in 2017 to combat domain spoofing has always had one key weakness: it relies on publishers to manually maintain their ads.txt files. But a new tool called sellers.guide, developed by a team at the video monetization vendor Primis, hopes to help publishers maintain their files automatically, making compliance to the protocol simpler, as well as offering potential long-term revenue gains. Increasing ad yields is not the primary appeal of sellers.guide, said Catherine Beattie, the director of digital ad operations at Encyclopedia Britannica. Beattie, who runs programmatic advertising for five websites including Merriam Webster, has been using the tool since May and sees its main value proposition as an asset for ads.txt compliance. “Sellers.guide is a tool to get you closer to your ads.txt file being accurate,” she told Adweek. “As to whether that drives revenue, that depends on whether your ads.txt file being accurate matters.” Why Publishers’ Adoption of Twitter Blue Is About More Than the Money Products like seller.guide are the latest attempt to bring transparency to the programmatic-advertising ecosystem, whose opacity and technical complexity has created an environment rife with fraud and mismanaged funds. Although the IAB Tech Lab is currently at work on the second iteration of its ads.txt protocol, implementation problems with its first version have hamstrung its efficacy, leaving publishers susceptible to grift. The benefit of up-to-date ads.txt files The main objective of sellers.guide is to prune unkempt ads.txt files, though the business case for such maintenance is still undetermined. Flagging unnecessary intermediaries and highlighting dormant pipelines could help publishers regain the 15 cents on every dollar of advertising spend they lose to porous supply chains, said sellers.guide managing director Lior Shvo. “Publishers are losing 29% of their advertising revenue to a crappy supply chain,” Shvo told Adweek, referring to a May 2020 study on programmatic supply chain transparency. “They need to have the same tools as everyone else, but ads.txt came with no automation for publishers.” The tool automates ads.txt upkeep, empowering publishers by reducing the workload required to look after the critical, dynamic document. The latest version of the free software, released Wednesday, introduced a wizard to guide users through the process of analyzing their ads.txt file to find redundancies, errors, inactive seats, mislabeled domains and other items of clutter that would otherwise go unattended. Publishers can choose how often they run scans, but routine maintenance combined with spot checks when adding new ads.txt lines is best practice, said Steve Boymel, vp of business development at Farlex, the company that runs TheFreeDictionary.com. Boymel, who is also a Primis customer, was invited to use a beta version of sellers.guide in April and considers it more time efficient than the manual alternative. “No same human goes and checks individual ads.txt lines because the amount of work that's involved is unbelievable. And it's not the kind of work you can do once and forget about it, because that stuff changes all the time,” Boymel said. “This tool keeps an eye on it, and if it sees something that's incorrect, it automatically flags it.” A step in the right direction The question of whether an organized, up-to-date ads.txt file will increase revenue or reduce latency remains a matter of debate, sources tell Adweek. Sellers.guide hopes to offer a conclusive answer to the question in time. One ads-ops practitioner was skeptical about whether maintenance would lead to financial or latency benefits. “If it was clear that if you cut your ads.txt file your revenue would go up, everyone would do it immediately and it would become industry best practice overnight,” said the ad-ops practitioner, who requested anonymity. "It depends on the individual publisher." But benefits to a publisher’s revenue line could be more subtle, said Paul Bannister, the co-founder of CafeMedia. A clean ads.txt file could yield higher revenues in three ways, he explained: by protecting better against fraud; by eliminating human mistakes, such as copy-and-paste errors or authorized connections that are overlooked; and by preventing against arbitrage perpetrated by buy-side algorithms that exploit publishers with an excess of pipelines. “I don't think sellers.guide is the ultimate answer to the question of, ‘How should a publisher vet all their partners and make sure that their inventory is represented transparently and fairly?’” Bannister said. “But it's a really good step in the right direction.”

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To Prune Ads.Txt Files, Publishers Are Turning to New Tools

Sellers.guide scans the documents and flags errors, helping reduce ad fraud

Mark Stenberg

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