New Tool Provides Comprehensive Resource to Confirm Authorized Ad Sellers

The IAB Technology Laboratory recently released ads.txt aggregator – a critical tool to support its ads.txt anti-fraud initiative. This service provides daily updates on publishers’ approved ad sellers, making it easier for marketers, agencies, and platforms to eliminate fraudulent inventory sources, and fight against domain misrepresentation.

Ads.txt (Authorized Digital Sellers), which launched in May 2017, allows publishers to list their authorized sellers and resellers, signaling to buyers exactly which supply paths to the publisher’s inventory are legitimate. The new IAB Tech Lab ads.txt aggregator is based on the largest web crawl for these ads.txt files. The service currently tracks over 2 million domains that have implemented ads.txt, compiles the contents of the crawled files, and makes the resulting data available to subscribers of the ads.txt aggregator on a daily basis.

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“Ads.txt has rapidly become a pivotal tool in fighting ad fraud, preventing bad actors from profiting off of valuable publisher domains,” said Dennis Buchheim, Senior Vice President and General Manager, IAB Tech Lab. “The new ads.txt aggregator is a powerful resource that supports transparency into authorized sellers, giving the buy side up-to-the-minute intelligence to ensure that they are always working with sanctioned partners.”

The aggregation service is available to IAB Tech Lab members for an annual fee of $5,000 from date of subscription, and to non-members for $10,000, both with automatic renewal. The aggregation is primarily intended as a wholesale replacement for companies that choose not to manage their own crawlers and are looking for comprehensive ads.txt data. Alternatively, some subscribers may choose to use IAB Tech Lab’s aggregation to supplement their own research and understand the broader market’s deployment of ads.txt.

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The IAB Tech Lab is a non-profit research and development consortium that produces and provides standards, software, and services to drive growth of an effective and sustainable global digital media ecosystem. Comprised of digital publishers and ad technology firms, as well as marketers, agencies, and other companies with interests in the interactive marketing arena, IAB Tech Lab aims to enable brand and media growth via a transparent, safe, effective supply chain, simpler and more consistent measurement, and better advertising experiences for consumers, with a focus on mobile and “TV”/digital video channel enablement.

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