What Content ads.txt & app-ads.txt Should Have?

Any serious blogger already know the basics on ads.txtbasics on ads.txtbasics on ads.txt. Gradually IAB and the browsers are implementing strict norms. Restriction on ads.txt can severely affect earning by blocking the network. Here is what content on ads.txt will return more money. ads.txt avoids spoofing. Ad fraud severely affects the earning of the industry. The target is to prevent unauthorized sellers from profiting off from inventory.

Does restricted ads.txt (not many resellers listed) affect the revenue? Not unless your niche is like us where cloud computing, big data are a big part. It may lead to loss of the resellers and they may remove the website from their list. A mistake is to think just adding ad networks such as Google will serve the purpose. Not that – Google themselves resell spaces to many third parties. High CPC websites added a big list.

For example, Google ad network allows some (high paying) adult, casino/gambling ads depending on the country (read IP) :

It is a technically complex procedure to display an adult ad on a technology website. If the website blocks that would waste enough milliseconds to return either a blank space or just a low-value ad. Read the below sentences carefully :

If a publisher does not implement ads.txt, that will mean anyone is authorised to sell the ad inventory of the website. The reason to add implement ads.txt is to allow only the known resellers and block all the others.
So any website must create the ads.txt file correctly. Unauthorised sells lead to advertiser declining buying ads.

 

What is app-ads.txt?

 

It is like ads.txt but for mobile publishers. app-ads.txt authorizes the digital sellers of the ad inventory in the mobile in-app segment, which mobile publishers can implement. Unless you are using some third-party services like AdMob, you do not need it.

 

What Content on ads.txt to add?

 

Since the ads.txt file format and content must follow a standard, a range of tools exists for validation, management and collaboration. There are several online tools to find errors (including duplicates) on your ads.txt file. WordPress has plugins which do that job on the dashboard. You may search on GitHub to get some developer tools.

But where to get the list of “good entries”? It costs huge to get the list. Thankfully, ads.txt is publicly available list on the larger websites. So, you can copy/update from the larger websites. We have collected a list here on GitHub as gist. You need to edit the entries such google pub id, remove the duplicates to use.

 

Conclusion

 

Thankfully the ad world is moving towards direct sponsorships and affiliate marketing. As publisher your work is to copy-paste, edit the file like you do with robots.txtrobots.txtrobots.txt.

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