What are Authorized Digital Sellers?
TownNews supports the newest ad technologies to ensure sites are current in the digital marketplace. Ads.txt, which stands for “Authorized Digital Sellers,” is a text file placed on the root directory of a site’s domain. The file contains a list of authorization codes which publicly declare the companies authorized to sell digital inventory. The goal of this initiative is to reduce ad fraud through transparency.
Creating a text file called 'ads.txt' that can be parsed by robots, tells ad networks what networks a site has authorized. This decreases the ability for unauthorized vendors who fraudulently attempt to sell ads on a network without a publishers permission.
TownNews Content and Data Sharing
TownNews provides additional content and advertising through our Advertising and Data Sharing partners. TownNews does this through the following programs:
If you participate in these programs, TownNews needs to add our partner IDs into your ads.txt file in order to provide these services (providing permission). These are identified on the ads.txt file with a hash tag (#) in front of the service provider listed within the Authorized Digital Sellers panel.
How do I know if I need an ads.txt file?
If you run any Programmatic Ads on your website, even if it is added via a third-party service such as a widget, it is likely you will require an ads.txt file.
A company may contact you directly about creating an ads.txt file for them to authorize their ads on your domain. Use the Authorized Digital Sellers Setting to included the necessary information such as domain name, publisher ID, relationship type, and possibly a certification authority ID (optional).
It is also possible that you will need to reach out to vendors to gather information in order to include them in the ads.txt file and avoid any possible lost revenue.
It is important to verify all communications you receive, especially via email and fax, from companies that appear to be someone you do business with, that are asking or telling you to add URL's to your ads.txt file. By adding them without verification defeats the purpose of using the ads.txt file to avoid fraudulent ads being placed on your site.
How to add entries to the ads.txt file
Within the Authorized Digital Sellers panel, enter or pasted ads.txt for the site. Upon completion, BLOX will build the ads.txt file for your site.
The hash tag (#) sign in front of each new/separate URL or URL groups, is a comment that identifies that authorized provider on your site.
Redirect to a delegate URL - Uses a different URL to provide the same type of protection (must enter the URL). This option will perform a 301 redirect to another file. It can be on another site, or on the same site in another location (for example, the /app directory).
This option is very helpful if you have a group of publications and you want to create the same ads.txt file on multiple domains. Choose a “master” domain to host your main file, and then set the other sites to point to that master domain. Then simply update the one master file and all sites reflect those changes after the cache expires.
According to the ads.txt 1.0.1 specification file, the ads.txt file can only be redirected once. It is very important to ensure that no additional redirects happen (ex: www or https redirects). Additional redirects may be in violation of the program’s requirements and not recognized.
Select the Save button to complete your changes.
Support for app-ads.txt
We have implemented an app-ads.txt file that will be served up when requested by an external service to help fight inventory fraud on native apps. The app-ads.txt file serves the same file as is used for ads.txt, so any directives you want to add specific to apps can just be included in the same file. Note that the app-ads.txt set up requires that your domain name is properly listed in your app store's meta data, so crawlers are able to extract the URL for an app from the app store, and then derive the app-ads.txt path from there.
You can learn more about these industry technologies here:
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