Step by step, the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) ads.txt initiative is being utilized by publishers.
The idea is that this text file, when made available on a publisher’s website, tells advertisers which exchanges or other sellers have the right to represent that publisher’s ad inventory. Faked inventory has been a big part of ad fraud, where unscrupulous sellers fraudulently represent that they can sell, for instance, ad space on The New York Times’s website.
Aside from adoption, one problem with ads.txt is that some publishers are not keeping them totally up to date by removing outdated sellers and adding new ones. Also, demand-side platforms (DSPs) have used web crawlers to go out and find the publishers’ ads.txt files, which can add time to this millisecond-wary industry and can miss updates in the intervals between sweeps.
To address these issues, ad blockchain firm MetaX has released what it calls Ads.txt Plus.
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