• SpotX Gains 100% Compliance with IAB’s ads.txt Spec

    Video ad tech provider SpotX has announced that it has achieved 100% compliance with the IAB’s ads.txt specification version 1.0.1. ads.txt, which was announced by IAB in May, 2017, is a way of preventing the sale of fraudulent or counterfeit ad inventory. Fraudulent ad inventory have been a constant source of consternation in the video ad business because it undermines the marketplace’s integrity, especially for programmatic, and causes spending waste.

    SpotX has been an early proponent of ads.txt. It has achieved 100% compliance since July. SpotX has ensured that when an ads.txt file is present, all bid requests to a demand side platform are only from seller with an ads.txt file. SpotX has over 60% of spending from DSPs who decision off of ads.txt.

    SpotX said that 85% of its publishers have now adopted ads.txt compared with a 60% industry-wide adoption rate. No surprise, effectiveness of ads with ads.txt is better, with 12% higher viewability and 15% higher eCPMs. SpotX said that sites without ads.txt have around 4x more invalid traffic. SpotX crawls 80K sites per day to collect ads.txt data.