The Interactive Advertising Bureau’s ads.txt standard is being abused by publishers mislabeling and sharing a “DIRECT” label for account-bidding IDs used in online bidding protocols — with the DIRECT labels being spread out across sometimes hundreds of unrelated websites. This inventory mislabeling creates online advertising Dark Pool Sales Houses, a market behavior that likely violates consumer protection frameworks, and in the future, securities laws should be expanded to explicitly address the purposeful mislabeling of online advertising inventory.
Breitbart.com is Partnering with RT.com & Other Sites via Mislabeled Advertising Inventory by Zach Edwards on Medium.com
There’s a good explanation of how this works at Branded.
“… evidence that Breitbart was continuing to siphon advertising dollars from unsuspecting brands without their knowledge or consent. He told us the average marketer would never know.
So *that’s* how Breitbart is still making money on Branded
[..] Every website has a number of account IDs to identify them on ad exchanges. Typically, websites that care about quality have just a handful. (e.g. NYT has 12). There are two types of account IDs: DIRECT and RESELLER. Sometimes, media conglomerates share the same account ID across their owned websites. If Condé Nast wanted to, they could do this with Vanity Fair, WIRED, and Teen Vogue. To make it clear that they’re sharing account IDs, they label one website with a DIRECT label, and the others with a RESELLER label. This is called pooling. [..] What outlets are not supposed to do, though, is share their DIRECT account ID with websites and companies that are completely unrelated to them. It’s not a direct sale, it mislabels the inventory, and it funnels advertiser money towards shared advertising accounts owned by unknown entities. That’s why we’re calling this dark pooling.”