Are You Compliant with Ads.Txt? What Publishers Need to Know

Brand safety and protection is a top priority when exploring native advertising and content recommendation, and we are excited to have the platform and technology to offer complete brand protection to our partners.

We believe in building relationships built on trust and powering personal web experiences. For publishers, this means industry leading performance and control, bringing you exponentially more revenue while putting your brand protection on auto-pilot.

We are excited to support a recent initiative by IAB that addresses fraudulent activity and improves the industry as a whole.

Ads.Txt for Publishers

One of our core values at Revcontent is to drive the best possible user experience, and with that comes the responsibility of transparency and trust.

Revcontent now supports ads.txt for publishers, an initiative founded by the IAB Technology Laboratory to increase transparency in the programmatic landscape. The goal is to ensure publishers’ inventory is only sold through authorized partners to prevent counterfeiting in addition to providing advertisers more control over their purchased inventory.

Fraudulent activity and spoofing occur when ad buyers are deceived into buying space on a low-end publisher site for a high price. The spoofers will list that the space is available on a high-end, premium publisher site, such as FastCompany.com, when in reality- their content will never run on FastCompany.com.

Why Does it Matter?

If a publisher is not ads.txt compliant, buyers will lack the transparency of knowing which SSPs (supply side platforms) are authorized to sell a certain publisher’s inventory. This helps ad buyers protect their brand and avoid fraudulent activity such as domain spoofing, so their ad spend can go to the intended publisher. It also allows publishers to report who is authorized to sell their inventory.

In order to ensure brand safety, we ask all of our publishing partners to comply with ads.txt guidelines.

Note: Many DSPs and advertisers will avoid purchasing traffic from publishers that are not compliant with ads.txt.

What’s Next?

Publishers must drop a text file on their web servers to list all of the demand partners authorized to tell their inventory.

Here’s How:

• Create your file as a text (.txt) using Notepad or a similar program. Your file should be hosted at the root level for your domain. Example: https://example.com/ads.txt
• Add Revcontent and all of our demand partners to your ads.txt file
• Click here for more information on what to include in your ads.txt file.

We are excited that this initiative has the potential to improve the entire industry. We will always strive to provide the utmost brand safety and transparency to our partners, and will continue to provide updates on new initiatives that improve the experience of users and our partners.  

For more information, contact your account representative or support@revcontent.com