Discover the advertising web with the files Ads.txt and Sellers.json
Rédigé par Benjamin Poilvé
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02 octobre 2020As part of its work on cookies and other tracers, the LINC is publishing two studies to visualise the interactions between the various players in online advertising. Based on a 'scraping' protocol, these studies provide an objective understanding of the mechanisms implemented and the extent of their use.
Targeted advertising, and particularly programmatic targeted advertising, often involves many intermediaries when selling advertising inventory from a publisher's website.
In order to allow greater trust between online advertising professionals, the IAB (Interactive Advertisement Bureau) proposes that they declare their business relationships through the use of two standards:
- The Ads.txt standard allowing website publishers to declare which companies are authorised to sell the advertising space they have available.
- The Sellers.json standard allows advertising space sellers (SSP for supply-side platform) to list their advertising inventory suppliers, whether they are publishers or intermediaries.
By automatically collecting this public data, the LINC has put a study online for each of these standards to understand how this ecosystem is structured, based on the 5,000 most visited French sites (Alexa ranking). These studies reveal an ecosystem of around 620 advertising systems and more than 6,000 intermediaries selling advertising inventory, an ecosystem characterised by a high level of intermediation, thus multiplying the number of players with access to Internet users' data.
The results of this work are available online:
Document reference
Resources
- For more information on how Real Time Bidding (RTB) works, read the article on the subject (in French).
- The sources of the project are available on the CNIL's Github account.
Article rédigé par Benjamin Poilvé
, Ingénieur au service de l’expertise technologique
