Telaria Inc., (NYSE: TLRA), a leading video monetization software company, is advocating for increased transparency across the entire video advertising ecosystem, and shares progress on the IAB’s ads.txt initiative.

Telaria has aggressively embraced ads.txt from both a technical innovation standpoint and a client-service perspective. Almost immediately after the initiative was announced, the platform incorporated a simple, self-service button into the dashboard that generates automatic code specific to the supply partner’s seat, which makes it easier for them to update their ads.txt file.

Rama Roberts, VP of Engineering, who was an early contributor to the industry initiative as part of his role on the Board of Directors at the IAB TechLab said, "Transparency has always been one of the cornerstones of our platform. We were happy to collaborate on this effort with the IAB TechLab, and were one of the first to roll out its support as a self-service feature to our publishers.”

Regarding publishers, Telaria has taken an active role with all clients to implement the IAB’s ads.txt initiative. Out of the gate, publishers on Telaria’s platform have adopted ads.txt at a rate four times the industry average. At this high level of adoption, 72% of Telaria’s top 500 domains are ads.txt-enabled.

The IAB’s ads.txt initiative is one standardized method for the industry to provide publishers with a simple way to list which companies are allowed to sell their inventory. Buyers can find this list through a web crawler, and easily gain confidence that they are buying impressions from an approved source. In fact, Telaria released an ads.txt crawler shortly after the initiative launch, to give buyers the power of crawling up to 10,000 domains to determine which of them are allowed to sell Telaria inventory. Third parties can use it to legitimize their role as authorized resellers in a market that increasingly demands verification.

Beyond simple implementation, additional standardization of the text files themselves would make the initiative even stronger. Differences in the way publishers set up their ads.txt files can create some confusion about who is allowed to sell certain inventory. One way to solve this is if publishers would list the exchanges that are approved for selling video vs. selling display. This would quickly clear up any question a buyer may have if they believe they are buying video but instead of true video player inventory, they are getting in-banner display video.

Katie Evans, Chief Operating Officer at Telaria, attributes the rollout’s success to several factors, saying, “Transparency is a core tenet of Telaria’s business. Ads.txt is another step toward a fully transparent, well-functioning supply chain. We’ve been aggressively tracking rollout, and our team is very hands-on with clients to help them take advantage of this new initiative. It’s encouraging to see content owners and publishers across the industry implement safeguards and controls. As the network effect increases, and marketers limit spend to only verified sellers, Telaria anticipates widespread adoption of the ads.txt program. It’s another way we are helping clients manage, not just monetize, all of the value tied into their inventory.”

About Telaria

Telaria (NYSE: TLRA), (formerly Tremor Video), is the leading independent data-driven software platform built to monetize and manage premium video inventory with the greatest speed, control, and transparency, wherever and however audiences are watching.