IgnitionOne Launches Open-source Ads.txt Crawler to Support Industry-wide Digital Media Transparency Initiative

NEW YORK, Dec. 11, 2017 -- IgnitionOne, a global marketing technology and services leader, has announced the availability of an open-source, fully-featured Ads.txt crawler that makes it easier for programmatic advertising platforms to whitelist legitimate inventory sources that can safely be made available to advertisers.

Ads.txt is an industry-wide initiative, spearheaded by the IAB Tech Lab and designed to bring greater transparency into programmatic media buying by providing publishers and content distributors with a mechanism to declare who is authorized to sell their inventory. By adopting the Ads.txt standard, legitimate publishers openly declare that platforms and exchanges may safely buy and sell their inventory, helping programmatic media buying platforms and advertisers weed out potentially fraudulent traffic and avoid suspect impressions.

“Ads.txt is an elegantly simple way to ensure advertising dollars make their way to legitimate content creators, and more importantly are shown next to the content the advertiser intended. Google is fully committed to Ads.txt and it’s great to see partners like IgnitionOne show their support for Ads.txt to help marketers and agencies identify authorized inventory sources,” said Pooja Kapoor, Head of Global Strategy, Programmatic and User Trust, Google.

The initiative continues to gain traction as the online advertising industry seeks to reduce so-called “domain spoofing,” which disguises fraudulent inventory as originating from a reputable source. 

“Fighting fraud is an issue that everyone across the advertising landscape – including buyers, sellers, and technology companies – is taking very seriously,” said Christopher Hansen, Chief Product Officer at IgnitionOne. “Ads.txt is a foundational initiative for injecting transparency into programmatic media buying, and the easiest way to spur its adoption is to continue to innovate further on the tools that buyers need. With that in mind, our crawler is fast and flexible – and we’ve made it open-source – in the hopes that others in the industry can leverage it and continue to help advance Ads.txt. As of this week, we’re also decisioning off the contents of an Ads.txt file when available.”

IgnitionOne’s Ads.txt crawler is multithreaded, processing multiple sites simultaneously, and enables ad tech and martech platforms to crawl thousands of URLs in moments, with support for a variety of data formats. Moreover, the open-source nature of the crawler also means that platforms can download the code and customize it based on their needs.

The open-source crawler is available for download on GitHub here.

About IgnitionOne
IgnitionOne offers technology and services that help marketers win. The company focuses on intelligent audience creation, real-time cross-channel scoring, and robust optimization – providing a layer for smarter marketing decisions and deeper insights, whether you use native IgnitionOne solutions such as Search, Display, Email, and Website Personalization – or the marketing technology you already have.

With a global footprint of over 450 employees in 10 countries, IgnitionOne is one of the largest independent marketing technology companies in the world, currently scoring over 300 million users monthly in 75 countries and powering more than $60 billion in revenue each year for leading brands, including General Motors, CenturyLink, Bridgestone, La Quinta and Acer, as well as advertising agencies such as 360i, GroupM and ZenithOptimedia.

For more information, please visit http://www.ignitionone.com or follow the company on Twitter @ignitionone.

Contact:
Kendall Allen
For IgnitionOne
[email protected]