eBay is the latest major company to get on board with the Ads.txt system to help fight ad fraud. This simple system will allow ebay to list the companies that they have authorized to sell their digital inventory.
The program was developed by IAB, and has been growing in popularity with all sorts of businesses. In eBay’s announcement, they said, “Spearheaded by the IAB, ads.txt is a new industry standard in combating fraud and will prevent the sale of counterfeit and unauthorized impressions in programmatic transactions. As publishers like eBay adopt ads.txt, buyers will be able to more easily identify the Authorized Digital Sellers for a participating publisher, allowing brands to have confidence they are buying authentic publisher inventory.”
The system should help eBay in particular, which has suffered from domain spoofing issues in the past, and continues to have them as a primary source of fraud.
