New ads.txt-only inventory control in Display & Video 360

The IAB’s ads.txt standard was created to increase transparency in the digital advertising ecosystem. By letting website owners publicly declare who is allowed to sell their ad space, ads.txt helps ad technology companies identify unauthorized and domain-spoofed inventory being sold across the industry.

Last November, as websites started putting up their ads.txt files, we began blocking unauthorized inventory from Google’s advertising systems. But what about inventory from sites that have not yet published an ads.txt file? To help prevent buying in those situations, we’ve launched a new ads.txt-only inventory control in Display & Video 360 (formerly known as DoubleClick Bid Manager). Now, marketers and agencies using Display & Video 360 can choose to run campaigns on sites that support ads.txt authorized inventory, and exclude inventory from sites without the file.

The transparency, simplicity and effectiveness of the ads.txt standard has helped publishers adopt it across the digital advertising ecosystem at a rapid pace. Since February of this year, more than 430,000 website domains have added an ads.txt file to their sites to verify their inventory, according to our ads.txt crawler.

We’re proud to say that nearly 90 percent of our publisher partners have adopted ads.txt. What’s more, over 80 percent of the available inventory across exchanges accessed by Display & Video 360 is now authorized. Finally, as more websites continue to adopt the standard, we plan to make the ads.txt-only inventory control the default setting for Display & Video 360 by the end of 2018.