Since December 20th, all unauthorized ads.txt domains will be blocked to cater to Smart’s demand partners’ desire to buy only ads.txt compliant inventory. In pursuit of a fraud-free ecosystem, Smart RTB+ inventory becomes 100 percent ads.txt compliant and ensures domain authenticity. Sites which have yet to implement ads.txt will continue to receive Smart’s demand, but only for a limited period of time.
Smart, announced this month a new policy which presents bid requests to demand partners exclusively from ads.txt compliant publishers. Smart says that “is the first supply-side platform to establish this policy and welcomes full participation from publishers to drive marketplace quality.”
“Along with key demand players in our industry, Smart is one of the leading ads.txt adopters, actively encouraging others to implement the initiative,” said Gorka Zarauz, Chief Quality Officer at Smart. “This latest announcement is a key milestone for Smart, as part of our ongoing efforts, to firmly guarantee advertisers with the highest quality inventory only. It’s the right time to do it and lead the way with our combined quality efforts.”
Smart crawls more than 300,000 domains worldwide and by mid-November, over 40,000 URLs contained a valid Smart ads.txt entry. This number has grown since as the initiative continues to be adopted by more publishers.