Well it’s been 6 months since ads.txt really started kicking off, and during this time adoption has been growing at a staggering speed. Mostly because large and influential platforms such as Google, AppNexus, Rubicon, etc are all supporting the initiative and have stopped buying unauthorized inventory.

But what’s next? What can we expect from ads.txt in 2018?

One thing that’s happening for sure is subdomain support, where pointers can be left in the root file to ads.txt files on its subdomains. The idea is that the specific sellers intended to be used to sell inventory on the subdomain get listed there. But the only thing this helps is employees in large companies with complex structures navigate updating seller IDs faster.

Aside from this, I don’t really see the subdomain spec fixing anything else. I know there’s a use case for blogs, where each user gets a subdomain for themselves (which would make those subdomains technically belong to someone else, so they’d need their own ads.txt file). But still, the 1.0.1 spec of the ads.txt standard doesn’t address this at all, since every blogging platform would need to have massive ads.txt files on the root level of their domain which are completely unusable by exchanges or DSPs when it comes to crawling and doing something useful with that information on a regular basis.

Some stuff that shouldn’t be next

• Decentralized register of domain & seller IDs (a.k.a. blockchain)
• Centralized, independent register of domain & seller IDs
• Buying only ads.txt authorized inventory (i.e. leaving out anyone who hasn’t posted a file)

What we need consensus on

There are a few things that ads.txt doesn’t really help with:

1. People like my mum who has a little flower garden photo blog with ads on it will have no idea how to implement ads.txt – first off she doesn’t know anything about it, let alone how to implement it
2. Several types of sites (or publishers with content on those sites) will be adversely affected by ads.txt:

• Content hubs (in the likes of HubPages)
• Blogging platforms (such as WordPress.com, Tumblr, Medium)
• Distribution platforms (such as Facebook apps, or gaming sites)