Pixalate this week released a report on App-ads.txt and Ads.txt trends. Pixalate saw a 1,122% increase in app-ads.txt adoption in Q3 2019. Over half of the top 1k programmatic apps have now app-ads.txt implemented. And over 1 million domains now have ads.txt.
According to Pixalate, apps without app-ads.txt have 63% more invalid traffic. Apps compliant with app-ads.txt had around 20% of IVT (invalid traffic) while apps without app-ads.txt had around 32% IVT.
Pixalate also found out that Android apps are implementing faster the app-ads.txt. 26% of the top android apps, on a universe of 5k iOS/Android apps, were compliant with app-ads.txt. In iOS, this number was 18%.
Ads.txt is used on the web, while app-ads.txt is used on apps. Ads.txt is a text file where publishers declare the authorized vendors that sell their inventory in programmatic. DSPs compliant with Ads.txt only buy authorized impressions, limiting domain arbitrage and domain spoofing. DSP’s are crawling daily the domains to be compliant for the Ads.txt. Not all DSPs have yet adopted Ads.txt.
In August, Basis DSP started to enforce app-ads.txt, and AdMob and Google Ad Manager introduced support for app-ads.txt. Tappx created a free hosting tool for the app-ads.txt. In September, DV360 started to enforce the app-ads.txt.