IAB Tech Lab offers aggregated and structured data sets for ads.txt, app-ads.txt, and sellers.json to provide the industry with a low cost and maintenance free replacement to managing your own crawler. The IAB Tech Lab data sets are also beneficial for supplementing your own research. This year, we’ve worked to further extend our CTV App Store support.
In 2023 Tech Lab added three new stores; Samsung, Vizio, and LG increasing supply chain transparency in CTV inventory! While some of these app stores are still working toward compliance with the app-ads.txt specification, we have begun crawling these stores for app-ads.txt files when supported.
What is Ads.txt and App-Ads.txt?
Ads.txt is a framework to prevent domain spoofing in programmatic transactions. It allows publishers and content creators to list authorized sellers of their programmatic inventory. This increases transparency in the supply chain and helps buyers identify counterfeit inventory being sold by bad actors..
App-ads.txt was released in 2019 as an extension to the original Ads.txt framework applying it to mobile and CTV app stores. The extension proves ownership of an application through the app store, while hosting the list of authorized sellers on the app-developer’s domain. Learn more about the app-ads.txt standard here.
How do I access the data?
The data is available for free. To access the aggregated App-Ads.txt data sets, you can create an account with your company email address in the IAB Tech Lab Tools Portal and browse the data by searching for an app at a specific app store The Transparency Center Supply Chain data is also available via APIs to download and integrate into your systems. The subscription to APIs is $2,500 for IAB Tech Lab members and $4,500 for non-members. This can be purchased within the Tools Portal. This purchase will give you full access to all Transparency Center APIs, not just ads.txt and app-ads.txt.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Associate Product Manager
IAB Tech Lab