In the world of digital advertising, ads.txt has established itself in recent years as a kind of potential solution to many of the problems that threaten investment in online ads. The big benefit of ads.txt is, or at least that’s the implied promise, that it helps fight ad fraud. When enabled it helps improve transparency in programmatic advertising and limits exposure to fraud. However, no matter how promising as a solution, the Taiwan Mobile Database results are not without problems and the tool has not become a shielded element against potential problems. For example, implementing ads.txt and not updating it regularly opens the door to new advertising problems and leaves the way open for cybercriminal activity and fraud. And even cybercriminals themselves have learned to cheat the system in a much more proactive way. An investigation in 2019 pointed out that the media had lost between 70 and 80 million dollars in advertising that they had not received, because it had gone to unverified sites that had managed to create a kind of illusion and pretended to be safe sites. They created a mirror game with ads.txt. 
But the problems are not only linked to ad fraud and cybercriminal activity, they are also linked to picaresque. That’s what an analysis of Escalated.io just discovered . What exactly has this study uncovered and why is it a problem for the media? Those responsible for the study have analyzed Brother Cell Phone List the correlation between the information included in the ads.txt file and what sellers.json provides. In their sample they have included around 100,000 network domains, to see what happens with online advertising and how it is bought and sold. Their findings indicate that there is a large divergence between the information that is included in ads.txt about the nature of who sells advertising and that that appears in sellers.json.
“The resulting data discovered a high number of entries declared as direct when reseller was expected, based on the fact that sellers.json listed the type of seller as an intermediary,” they point out in the study’s conclusions. This confusion has, on the one hand, implications in terms of transparency. Considering that the industry complains that things should be more transparent, a situation like this is not desirable. As those responsible for the study explain, both ads.txt and sellers.json are tools created to “build transparency and trust” in the programmatic advertising ecosystem. Not using them correctly damages the path to those goals. On the other, it also has an economic effect. Advertisers are paying premiums to go straight to the medium when in reality those amounts are being left on the road by intermediaries.
Researchers have not been able to determine a clear reason why this occurs, although they have identified four behavioral patterns that explain this divergence. That is, they have managed to identify four scenarios that are repeated on a regular basis and for which these identification errors occur. It is not the only reason. There are also strategic reasons. Thus, another reason is in what the medium itself does: it changes the identification from reseller to direct in that environment because it believes that in this way it will increase its income. Another economic reason is in the protection of agreements between media and platforms. Changing the identification seeks to protect exclusivity agreements, so that they are not in a disadvantageous position in the market. And finally, the fourth big scenario is that of human error. They are misidentified because it is not yet well understood what these codes mean and what they work for.