Ads.txt: A Year In, It's Working

About a year ago, a simple device called ads.txt was introduced to the digital advertising industry. It is a code-on-page tool that allows publishers to indicate who are the legal resellers of their impressions. This is in direct response to the industry problems of fraudulent traffic and legal arbitrage, the former of which is outright theft from advertisers and the latter of which is a value-sucking symptom of an immature industry.

Information regarding levels of adoption at this point can be interpreted subjectively: people either think that adoption is moving too slowly or they are pleased or surprised with the speed of adoption. I am very pleasantly surprised by the rate of adoption, and think everyone else should be as well (except for fraudulent actors and arbitrage networks, who should be unpleasantly suprised).

Here are some key figures and how I interpret them:

• 60% of the comScore 1,000 have implemented ads.txt. It was less than 10% last August. This is remarkable speed for majority adoption of anything among a large group of large companies. The rate of adoption is decelerating slightly, but as buyers continue to say this is important, publishers will eventually be convinced that it's important to upload these files. It will be in the 90% range by this time next year.
• 19% of buyers have never heard of ads.txt. Again, I am amazed, mainly because I look at this inversely: 80% of buyers have heard of something that didn't exist a year ago. This is practically a brushfire of awareness. I would not expect more than 80% at this point, because I would only expect buyers concerned with brand safety and fraud concerns to notice ads.txt, and while that describes most buyers, it doesn't describe them all.
• 17% of the ads.txt files out there have errors. You can guess what I'm about to say, right? That means that 83% of them got it right. In an industry that accepts up to 10% discrepancies in everything as "business as usual," 83% correct implementation of a standard within a year is remarkable, even for a simple one.

Ads.txt is a great solution to these industry problems for the internet technology that exists today. Adoption in the first year has been very impressive, if not complete, and I think that we can expect this to be pure table stakes for both the buy side and the sell side within a year or so from now.

https://digiday.com/media/state-ads-txt-5-charts/