Our app-ads.txt commitment.
By the SF Ads Media team · 4 min read
If you visit sfadsmedia.com/app-ads.txt
right now, you'll find a complete authorized-digital-sellers manifest:
publisher account identifiers, demand-partner relationships, the full
chain of authorization. We publish it from day one, before we have a
line of fill revenue.
That's an unusual choice. Most new SSPs and exchanges wait until they
have meaningful demand-side relationships in production before publishing
their app-ads.txt — there's a chicken-and-egg risk
(your manifest can't reference partners who haven't authorized you yet) and
a competitive-disclosure concern (your manifest tells competitors which
demand partners you're talking to).
We made the opposite call, deliberately, for three reasons.
1. Transparency is a buyer signal, not an after-thought
DSP buyer-side teams audit new SSPs on a few standard checks. One of the
fastest is to see whether the SSP has a complete, valid, current
app-ads.txt served at the canonical location and a
sellers.json with verifiable seller identity. An empty or
missing file is an instant red flag — not because it's strictly required
on day one, but because it signals an SSP that hasn't done the basic
plumbing.
Publishing complete supply-chain transparency manifests on day one signals the opposite: the operator built the plumbing first, and is happy to be audited.
2. It forces us to do the work properly
The most common form of supply-chain transparency cheating is partial
compliance — listing one or two demand-partner relationships in
app-ads.txt while routing through unlisted relationships
on the back end. That's exactly the kind of corner-cutting that becomes
the auditor's smoking gun later.
By publishing a complete manifest from day one, we commit ourselves to a single rule: if it's in the manifest, it's authorized; if it's not in the manifest, we don't route to it. The manifest is the authoritative list. It can't drift.
3. It gives publishers the audit primitive they need
The hardest thing for a small DOOH operator joining a new SSP is verifying
that their inventory is actually being represented honestly. The
sellers.json at the SSP and the app-ads.txt at
the publisher's domain are the only public-facing audit primitives the
industry has agreed on. By publishing ours completely and keeping the
publisher's chain entry visible, we give every operator on the network
a way to verify, at any moment, that we're representing them the way we
said we would.
The supply-chain transparency standards are the boring infrastructure of programmatic. They get a lot less attention than auction mechanics or DSP integrations or audience-data deals. But they're the part that makes the trust model work — and we'd rather over-invest in them early than retro-fit them later.
Inspect the manifests anytime:
/app-ads.txt ·
/sellers.json ·
/ads.txt.