• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, May 9, 2018

The Interactive Advertising Bureau's IAB Tech Lab is rolling out a paid aggregation service that will offer daily updates on information posted by publishers that implement the anti-fraud tool ads.txt.

Ads.txt aims to prevent advertisers from buying unauthorized inventory programmatically. Publishers that implement ads.txt -- which stands for Authorized Digital Sellers -- post indexes of their authorized sellers; buyers of ad inventory can then use that information to screen out unauthorized sellers.

The new paid ads.txt aggregation service will cost $5,000 annually for IAB Tech Lab members, and $10,000 annually for non-members. The IAB says the aggregation tool is primarily intended for companies that "choose not to manage their own crawlers and are looking for comprehensive ads.txt data."

The aggregation service "currently tracks over 2 million domains that have implemented ads.txt, compiles the contents of the crawled files, and makes the resulting data available to subscribers of the ads.txt aggregator on a daily basis," the IAB states.

Final specs for ads.txt were released in May 2017 by the IAB's Tech Lab. In late September, Google said its DoubleClick Bid Manager would only buy publishers' inventory from “sources identified as authorized sellers in its ads.txt file when a file is available.”

The industry's Trustworthy Accountability Group, which aims to combat ad fraud (as well as malware and online piracy), will require publishers to adopt ads.txt by July 1 in order to receive a "certified against fraud" seal.