The average number of ads.txt lines per domain is now 438 (November 2023). This number has been growing exponentially, , reaching 71% growth since January 2021. Beginning in May 2023, the average number of ads.txt lines decreased due to major publisher houses and AdOps companies that underwent massive cleanups in their domains which impacted the average.
Expanding and maintaining this trend to mid/low tier publishers is the biggest challenge.
Non-existing seats are the strongest indicator of an unmanaged ads.txt file. The growth of non-existing seats shows us that publishers still aren't managing their ads.txt files, despite tools and resources such as the Wizard and Edit Mode making the process of removing them very easy. Until now, we have seen the number of non-existing seats grow along with the number of ads.txt lines, but as of November 2023, the number of ads.txt lines has decreased while the number of dead seats has increased. It seems that publishers that were responsible for cleaning up and reducing the number of lines mainly removed partners (sellers) and did not validate the remaining lines.
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If current ads.txt files represented the actual state of our industry, an average domain would be working with 67 different sellers, after almost two years of seeing the numbers soley increase, this number has actually decreased since May 2023. We see that some major publisher houses and AdOps companies made major cleanups in which had an impact on the average number of sellers. Despite the progress, this number is still very high and we see that there are still buyers that are misrepresented (34% of the sellers are represented as DIRECT).
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The number of domains adding OwnerDomain and ManagerDomain values is increasing since the specification was released in August 2022. 25% of the domains scanned have already added the new values. AdOps companies and big publishers were among the first to adopt these values. The more publishers adopt these specifications, the more transparent the supply chain will be.
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The average number of ads.txt lines per domain is 438. The actual number is even higher, but we don't include duplicated or invalid lines in our calculations. 122 of these lines (27%) claim to be direct - meaning the sellers behind these lines are claiming to be the domain owners. 122 is a very high number and it proves that there is misrepresented inventory in the supply chain.
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