This week's review of ad fraud and quality in the digital advertising space.
Pixalate this week released Mobile App-Ads.txt Adoption Reports for Google Play Store apps and Apple App Store apps, reviewing mobile app-ads.txt adoption trends in 2020. Pixalate analyzed more than 5.5 million apps for the reports.
Of note: From Q1 to Q4 2020, app-ads.txt adoption increased by 79% across the top 10,000 Android apps and 77% across top 10,000 iOS apps. (Top apps are based on the number of programmatic ads sold, net of invalid traffic (IVT), as measured by Pixalate.)
Adweek dives into a budding trend: TV networking building their own ad tech stacks as streaming — and Connected TV (CTV) advertising — continues to grow. "Disney, Discovery and ViacomCBS all have new programmatic solutions," wrote Adweek.
In early March, Google noted (without directly saying so) that it would not support the Unified ID 2.0 tracking solution independent ad tech firms have been working on. In this article, AdExchanger examines some other roadblocks facing Unified ID 2.0, including its scalability, consolidation of power, burner emails, and consumer consent.
The IAB Tech Lab this week "released four new specs that aim to bring more accountability and standardization to the drastically changing online identity and ad targeting practices," reported Adweek. The specs largely revolve around consumer privacy, regulation frameworks, and ad targeting best practices.
In this New York Times opinion piece, the NYT Editorial Board argues that America's privacy settings need a revamp. "Americans have become inured to the relentless collection of their personal information online," the NYT wrote. "One straightforward solution is to let people opt in to data collection on apps and websites."
