Since it was first announced earlier this year by the IAB Tech Lab (see Ads.txt – Authorized Digital Sellers) the entire AdTtech world has scrambled to adapt ads.txt. We think it’s a great and simple approach to ensure advertisers know what they are buying, and to protect publishers from fraudulent buying practices. So, we are all in on ads.txt

What is ads.txt?

ads.txt is an initiative (also known as Authorized Digital Sellers) put forth by the IAB Technology Laboratory as a way to combat fraud and help publishers ensure inventory is sold only through authorized partners. The goal is to give publishers more control over who sells their inventory and help prevent counterfeiting, while giving buyers confidence they’re purchasing approved inventory. For more details, see About ads.txt on the IAB website.

With increasing cases of fraud and malvertising, safe buying is a top priority for advertising agencies and brands, and should be for publishers as well.  Because of this, ad agencies and brands will begin only buying from sites that have ads.txt implemented toward the end of this year.

At Gourmet Ads we want to make it easy for our publishers to adapt ads.txt. We’ve taken several steps to ensure simple adaption for our publishers and as always, we’re here to help with any questions.

• Custom ads.txt for Each Publisher

  All publishers within their reporting console, have access to a fully customized ads.txt they can download and save to the root folder of their website.Go to Resources Tab > then Files

  

• Built into WordPress Plugin 

  Within our Gourmet Ads WordPress Plugin (the same plugin that makes it super easy to install our ads tags) we save a customized ads.txt version for your website. Absolutely nothing else for you to do except download and activate our plugin.

• txt Specific Crawler

  We’ve built a smart crawler that allows us to understand which of our publishers has ads.txt installed and who hasn’t. or who has it but hasn’t got the correct setup etc. We’re working on building reminders and alerts into our publisher console to help aid in the deployment.

• Workflow in Onboarding new Publishers.

  We’ve added ads.txt to our comprehensive onboarding process. Which means before we fully sign off on a publisher installation, we check that ads.txt is in place.

For instructions on downloading your Ads.txt file please see this FAQ

*At this time Blogger and Squarespace do not support the addition of ads.txt in a site’s root file.