BidSwitch, the global programmatic trading infrastructure, announced today that it has rolled out ads.txt support across its partner ecosystem of 350 Demand and Supply partners. This means that effective immediately, BidSwitch buyers can now directly action against this ads.txt information in their own bidding logic for supply partners accessed via BidSwitch without the need to crawl the ads.txt files themselves.
Additionally, BidSwitch is already working proactively with MediaMath, The Trade Desk, and other major DSP partners to block non-compliant traffic from the SSPs they are connected to via the BidSwitch infrastructure.
“BidSwitch wholly supports the Ads.txt initiative and its effort to bring additional transparency and quality control to the programmatic ecosystem. As a neutral infrastructure layer that helps connect much of the industry, BidSwitch is in a unique and influential position to help push the adoption of this initiative forward.“ – said Barry Adams, VP of Commercial Development at BidSwitch.
As part of the implementation, BidSwitch employs a crawler that indexes more than 1.2 million domains a day currently traded through the BidSwitch infrastructure. A list of all publisher domains and eligible representatives is captured and stored based on the published ads.txt files. As of October 26th, all bid requests passed by BidSwitch now contain a dedicated field (ext.ads_txt) with the data related to the ads.txt status of that publisher domain. This data set includes the status (not authorized, authorized as DIRECT, authorized as RESELLER), the publisher ID as shown in the ads.txt file, and the Certification Authority ID, if present. If domains do not carry ads.txt files or the files themselves are incorrect, the data is considered invalid and will not pass along the ads.txt data in the bid request to buyers.
Partner MediaMath recently announced its own aggressive rollout strategy for ads.txt, in which they will begin buying only via authorized paths from those publishers in the Curated Market, its premium supply product, who have an ads.txt file in place.
“Ads.txt is a powerful tool available to tackle the issue of fraud, and it is great to see BidSwitch taking a proactive stance in support of it,” – said Lewis Rothkopf, general manager of supply at MediaMath. “We are optimistic that the more the buyside mandates this initiative, that publisher adoption will pick up.”
BidSwitch is dedicated to creating an open, efficient and fully transparent real-time ecosystem, which includes continual efforts to combat fraud. The tools are now in place to empower all BidSwitch partners to implement ads.txt support whenever they are ready to do so.