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IAB Tech Lab launches aggregation service for ads.txt

The new service crawls sites and assembles a frequently updated spreadsheet of authorized sellers for specific domains.

Barry Levine on May 14, 2018 at 1:12 pm

A year ago, the IAB Tech Lab released ads.txt to help stop the sale of counterfeit inventory for ads.

The text file, posted on each domain or sub-domain owned by a publisher, indicates the only resellers, direct sellers or others who are authorized to represent that site’s inventory. The New York Times’s ads.txt file, for instance, will list the only resellers who can sell the space on its site, thus preventing fraudsters from selling space for which they don’t have the rights.

But there are a lot of publishers out there using ads.txt, and managing all those publishers’ text files can be a pain. One potential solution, for instance, is a blockchain-based application directly launched late last year by ad blockchain firm MetaX.

Now, the IAB Tech Lab is offering its own roundup mechanism, an aggregation service that crawls over 2 million domains and subdomains. The result is an Excel .csv file that can be downloaded by subscribers from the Tech Lab’s site, at an annual fee of $5,000 for IAB Tech Lab members and $10,000 for non-members.

[Read the full article on MarTech Today.]

About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.