March 6, 2018 — By: Ross Benes, eMarketer
"Last May, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Tech Lab launched ads.txt, which is a text file on publishers’ sites that lists all the vendors that are authorized to sell their inventory," wrote eMarketer. "Because domain spoofing and arbitrage have plagued programmatic advertising, ads.txt was created so that ad buyers could have a tool to check whether a vendor’s claim to a piece of inventory was legitimate or not."
"Adoption of ads.txt was slow at first, but it has really taken off over the past five months. In September 2017, just 8.5% of the top 5,000 websites worldwide selling programmatic ads had adopted ads.txt, according to Pixalate," eMarketer wrote. "But by the end of February 2018, more than half of these sites were using ads.txt."
You can find Pixalate's original blog post on the ads.txt breakthrough here.
You can download the full list of sites with ads.txt here.
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Per the MRC, “'Fraud' is not intended to represent fraud as defined in various laws, statutes and ordinances or as conventionally used in U.S. Court or other legal proceedings, but rather a custom definition strictly for advertising measurement purposes. Also per the MRC, “‘Invalid Traffic’ is defined generally as traffic that does not meet certain ad serving quality or completeness criteria, or otherwise does not represent legitimate ad traffic that should be included in measurement counts. Among the reasons why ad traffic may be deemed invalid is it is a result of non-human traffic (spiders, bots, etc.), or activity designed to produce fraudulent traffic.”