Ads.txt adoption over 60% among top 1,000 programmatic publishers

This blog series provides a weekly summary highlighting some of the key takeaways as the programmatic industry adopts ads.txt, the IAB-led anti-ad fraud initiative. Last week's update can be found here.

Pixalate has also made available for download the full list of publishers with ads.txt implemented, which also gets updated weekly. 

Ads.txt adoption at a glance: Over 15,500 new publishers implement ads.txt this week

Ads.txt adoption reached some new highs this week:

• Ads.txt adoption remained above the 50% mark among the top 5,000 programmatic publishers after first surpassing the milestone last week
  • The figure crept up to 51.6%
• Over 15,500 new publishers implemented ads.txt in the past week

Here are the latest ads.txt adoption figures, as of March 5, 2018.

Nearly 170,000 publishers now have ads.txt

As of March 5, 2018, 169,923 publishers have implemented ads.txt.

This represents an increase of 15,522 since last week. 

Ads.txt adoption has increased 89.6% so far in 2018

According to Pixalate’s research, the total number of publishers with ads.txt was 89,638 as of January 1, 2018.

An additional 80,000-plus publishers have implemented ads.txt since then — representing a rise of 89.6% within 9 weeks (63 days).

Pixalate Top 1,000: 60.2% of the top 1,000 programmatic publishers have ads.txt

Of the top 1,000 sites based on programmatic advertising volume (the “Pixalate Top 1,000”), 607 sites have implemented ads.txt — or 60.70%.

This represents an increase of five (5) new publishers since last week.

This number is up from 571 on January 1, representing a year-to-date rise of 6.30%.

Pixalate Top 5,000: 51.60% of the top 5,000 programmatic publishers have ads.txt

Of the top 5,000 sites based on programmatic advertising volume (the “Pixalate Top 5,000”), 2,580 sites have implemented ads.txt — or 51.60%.

This indicates that an additional 31 sites within the Pixalate Top 5,000 implemented ads.txt in the past week.

This number is up from 2,355 on January 1, representing a year-to-date rise of 9.55%.

27% of Alexa Top 1,000 sites have ads.txt

As of this writing, 270 Alexa Top 1,000 publishers have implemented ads.txt — or 27.00%.

This number is up from 220 on January 1, representing a year-to-date rise of 22.73%

Last week, Pixalate measured 272 Alexa Top 1,000 publishers as having implemented ads.txt. Publishers can move in and out of these top rankings. 

20.26% of Alexa Top 5,000 sites have ads.txt

As of this writing, 1,127 Alexa Top 5,000 publishers have implemented ads.txt — or 22.54%. 

This represents an increase of eight (8) new publishers since last week.

This number is up from 1,013 on January 1, representing a year-to-date rise of 11.25%.

Download the full list of publishers with ads.txt

You can download the full list of publishers with ads.txt here:

Want more data-driven insights? Sign up for our blog!