WoltLab Cloud ads.txt Manager 5.4.2

Create, manage, and validate your ads.txt from within your Admin Control Panel.

The ads.txt manager for WoltLab Suite (and especially WoltLab Cloud) allows you, to manage your ads.txt from within your Admin Control Panel.

Ads.txt: what’s the function of the file?

Lots of websites finance themselves through advertisements. Adverts allow website providers to generate revenue and make the media content on their pages available to visitors for free. A big market for programmatic advertising (fully automatic sale and purchase of online advertisement spots) has appeared as a result – and it sometimes handles pretty substantial amounts of money. So it’s no wonder that there is also plenty of black sheep romping about in this area, trying to get a piece of the marketing cake without any actual effort. With the initiative ads.txt, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) wanted to hamper attempts at ad fraud. Ad fraud refers to mock advertising efforts that either aren’t provided at all or only to an insufficient extent.

How does ads.txt work?

IAB uses “ads” as an acronym for “authorized digital sellers” – although the term “ad” is more often used as an abbreviation for “advertising.” In this simple text file, the publisher should list out all providers that are permitted for the sale of their advertising space. The file gives publishers a greater say in trading their advertising space. At the same time, it also ensures more transparency, as it specifies exactly which providers are to be cooperated with.

Publishers deposit the ads file into the root directory of their web presence, the uppermost directory of the website. This is where robots.txt is located, for example, which provides the information for search engine crawlers. Ads.txt can also be processed by crawlers in the exact same way. The text file is publically accessible and can be read by machines as well as humans.

Since the file is located in the root directory and is required to be called ads.txt (example.com/ads.txt), it’s pretty quick and easy to find: For example, the ads.txt files of The New York Times, The Guardian, or The Washington Post can be called up with no further ado. This way, advertisers and platforms can check whether the sale is even permitted by the merchant in question. If a publisher is listed on an advertising marketplace and the corresponding ads file can be checked by all those involved, then it’s significantly more difficult for scams to run on platforms that spoof a false identity that’s not listed in the ads.txt.

With ads.txt, it’s now verifiable whether an offer is real or not. Some marketplaces, such as Google, have already implemented the standard on their own platforms. Ads.txt is automatically crawled if a publisher has made their inventory available. If the publisher hasn’t noted the marketplace in their ads.txt file, then no transaction can take place.

How does the ads.txt manager work?

The ads.txt manager is both: an editor and a validator. It allows you to modify your ads.txt (or create it, if it does not exist) and it validates your file before saving it. This validation is essential, because an invalid ads.txt may cause high-profit loss. The intelligent validation helps you to identify and fix any problem, even in bigger files.

Does the ads.txt manager also support the app-ads.txt file?

Managing the app-ads.txt file is supported since version 5.2.1 of this extension.