It's been reported this week that 1,400 mobile apps loaded ads on TV Guide's domain. How did this happen, in an age when everyone's on board with Ads.txt? Well, the answer is simple, but it's not what you want to hear: The buyers just hadn't been scanning those Ads.txt files…
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As far as malvertising is concerned, redirects remain a particular scourge for ad ops teams. On mobile in particular, a redirect can wreck a user’s session at the least. It’s worse if the user is wise enough to avoid downloading whatever the redirect tells them to download. These attacks are…
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One of the main goals of Ads.txt is to combat domain spoofing. It's angled to be both simple to understand and implement, and harder for bad actors to game than good old whitelisting and blacklisting. But there's more to ads.txt than slapping together a list of partners who are authorized…
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Repent, sinners, because the digital media apocalypse is now upon us. Even outside the trades, the news is awash in talks of corrections; discourses on the failure of advertising and why subscriptions are the only option; and pre-emptive surrenders of souls to the Duopoly. I hear bunker sales are through the roof…
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Ads.txt landed in the digital media world circled by a lot more confusion than you'd expect from a text file. Although the goals of rendering domain spoofing worthless and cutting down on arbitrage were quite noble, the approach was almost too simple for an industry that revels in complexity. Fortunately, the folks at…
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The 43rd AdMonsters Publisher Forum has taken us to Nashville, where we'll be spending the next few days wrapping our heads around a particularly intense season in digital media. From what I could gauge from chatting with attendees and sponsors at last night's dinner, there are loads of questions in…
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Who's This Asking to Get Into Your Ads.txt? Over on Reddit, publishers are reporting they’re receiving loads of emails from senders identifying themselves as reps from some kind of agency or another, demanding their company be added to the publisher’s Ads.txt file or else they’ll stop buying that publisher’s inventory.…
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Ads.txt is an initiative the IAB Tech Lab launched earlier this year to ensure greater transparency in the programmatic marketplace by creating a record of who is authorized to sell or re-sell ad inventory. The top aim of Ads.txt is to crack down on domain spoofing, a widespread, wily and…
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Earlier in 2017, savvy publishers and platforms started noticing a gnarly new breed of mobile redirects, one that’s particularly evasive to common-practice malware prevention methods. It’s a new page in the standard playbook malvertisers long ago developed to skirt around the watchdogs in the ad ecosystem, one that allows them…
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Today (May 17), the IAB Tech Lab rolled out a new method for combating ad fraud, specifically of the domain-spoofing variety. It’s called Ads.txt, which stands for Authorized Digital Sellers, or at least it is if you really need to turn the word “ads” into an acronym in this industry.On…
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