Ep 6: ads.txt hygiene: OWNERDOMAIN and MANAGERDOMAIN

Your ads.txt says DIRECT. Buyers may still read reseller.

Owner domain is an ads.txt line naming the company that owns the site.

Say Northwind Media owns news.example. Your SSP’s sellers.json lists you as a publisher at northwind.example. A buyer’s crawler opens news.example/ads.txt. There is no owner domain line, so the spec says, assume the owner is news.example. That does not match northwind.example. In IAB guidance, a seller that matches neither owner nor manager reads as a reseller. The fix is one line: owner domain equals northwind.example. Manager domain is different. Use it only for a primary or exclusive seller, like a sales house in Germany, with its country code. It is not a list of your SSPs.

Open your ads.txt. Does owner domain match your sellers.json domain?

Next: curated audiences, selling your own first-party data signals.