6 December 2017 - LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)

MetaX, a blockchain technology company driving development and adoption of open platforms for digital advertising and the creator of the adChain protocol and adToken (ADT), has brought the existing IAB Tech Lab ads.txt utility to the Ethereum blockchain, resulting in Ads.txt Plus, one of the first open source decentralized applications (DApps) for digital advertising. It is now available in beta on the Ethereum Rinkeby testnet.

Ads.txt is an IAB Tech Lab project aimed towards transparency within the inventory supply chain of the programmatic advertising industry. Since ads.txt is a public webserver file, it makes it easier for buyers to identify authentic publisher inventory.

“Ads.txt was a great leap forward for the digital advertising community,” said MetaX Chief Revenue Officer, Alanna Gombert. “As members of the IAB Tech Lab Blockchain Working Group, we decided to give back to the community and build Ads.txt Plus, an open source version built on Ethereum. This is part of our greater mission to encourage honesty, integrity and communication within the advertising industry.”

Ads.txt Plus provides the following features:

• Automatically publish “Distributed Lists of Sellers” (DLS) to subscribers: Ads.txt Plus eliminates the need for programmatic buyers to develop and run a web crawler by using an “ads.txt aware” smart contract. A DSP only needs to hit a provided API endpoint to retrieve Publishers' DLS record. Given blockchain is a universal data set that is always up-to-date, participants can listen to events and receive pro-active push updates that occur immediately when changes are made by publishers to ads.txt records stored in the ads.txt smart contract.
• Support mobile web and mobile app: Ads.txt Plus enables publishers to easily manage their supply chains for mobile web and native app properties.
• Provide publishers with a private listing of resellers: Ads.txt Plus provides a highly secure, encrypted environment that gives the publisher control over their level of disclosure, while still allowing programmatic buyers to access and target campaigns using this information.

“I am glad to see MetaX embrace and build upon the ads.txt standard,” said Neal Richter, CTO of Rakuten Marketing, as well as co-chair of the IAB TechLab's OpenRTB working group and one of the creators of ads.txt. “I look forward to more publishers implementing ads.txt and increasing supply security in our industry.”

Educational material such as Ads.txt Plus video tutorials are available in the adChain Help Center and Ads.txt Plus smart contracts can be found on Github.

Source: MetaX

Illustration Photo: Digital Advertising (credits: Metropolitan Transportation Authority / Patrick Cashin / Flickr Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0))