Ad Ops Insider

What is ads.txt?

Ads.txt is an IAB Tech Lab project that was created to fight inventory fraud in the digital advertising industry. The idea is simple; publishers put a file on their server that says exactly which companies they sell their inventory through. The file lists partners by name, but also includes the publisher’s account ID. This is the same ID buyers see in a bid request, which they can use as a key for campaign targeting.

Are you a developer or patient person? Then try the ads.txt crawler yourself?

As part of the program’s release, Neal Richter, a long time ad technology veteran and one of the authors of the ads.txt spec wrote a simple web crawler in Python. The script takes a list of domains and parses the expected ads.txt format into a database, along with some other error handling bits. Developers will probably find it a piece of cake to use and non-developers will struggle a bit, like I did.

How to get your ads.txt web crawler running?

First things first – before you try to run this script need to have a few things already in place on your machine. If you don’t have these pieces yet it’ll be a bit of a chore, but it’s a great excuse to get it done if you want to do more technical projects in the future.