With programmatic ad buying, advertisers and agencies often hit fraud where they think they are buying awesome-website.com but in fact aren't. The ads.txt specification from the IAB allows a publisher to say "yes, I am working with these SSPs and Exchanages. So if you are an advertiser/agency and you see an RTB bid request come from these accounts, that is us and it's not fraud".
- The publisher needs to add a file called
ads.txtto the root of your website. For example, if your website ishttp://www.example.com, then you need to have a text file at the following url:http://www.example.com/ads.txt.
This file must be put on the server. It CAN'T load via javascript or ad server.
- Add the following text to that file:
indexexchange.com, 185362, RESELLER # video (tout)
- Tell your Tout customer support representative which domains you've done this for, so we can keep you in the loop if there are any changes/modifications needed for Tout's ads.txt entries.
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If your technical team or CMS vendor is slightly confused by the request, you can tell them "ads.txt" is very similar to "robots.txt". It's a file which you put on your server which is meant to be read by computers and humans. In the same way that robots.txt helps with search engines, ads.txt helps with programmatic ad buyers.
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Adding this file to your server will not affect any network requests in the browser. A web browser does NOT load the ads.txt file when a user is on your site (unlike a crossdomain.xml file). So there is no risk that adding this file will break any other part of your website.
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For more info, please go here: https://iabtechlab.com/ads-txt/
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For the ads.txt IAB spec, please go here: https://iabtechlab.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/IABOpenRTBAds.txtSpecification_Version1_Final.pdf