Protect the Future of Digital Advertising

Help drive industry adoption of buyers.json to eliminate malvertising, protect users, and restore a balanced relationship between buyers and sellers.

Pledge your support

Overview

What is buyers.json?

buyers.json is a file made publicly available by DSPs that identifies the names and IDs of the buyers they represent, facilitating quick identification of threat actors when attacks occur. Buyers.json would bring transparency to the buy side in the same way that prior initiatives such as Sellers.json and Ads.txt brought transparency to the sell side.

Why is this important?

Advertisers are attracted to digital advertising for the enormous reach it offers, its advanced targeting capabilities, and the ability to measure results quickly and adapt. These same factors make digital advertising a powerful attack vector for malvertisers.

The door to the ad tech ecosystem is largely open: with a creative asset and a credit card, anyone can buy an ad and go live, often with minimal vetting and oversight.

One of the chief challenges with eradicating malvertising is buyer identification. Malvertisers take advantage of the highly fragmented nature of the ecosystem by exploiting the weakest links and jumping frequently from DSP to DSP. As soon as they are found out on one DSP, they seamlessly shift their campaigns to a new one. Publishers and SSPs seldom have insight into the identities of buyers and therefore cannot relay the information to the DSP that would allow them to block a known bad entity across all the access points at once. The end effect is whack-a-mole, with the same entity appearing again and again across different DSPs.

buyers.json helps solve the problem of buyer identification and is a necessary step to protect users from malvertising, reduce the use of ad blockers by restoring user trust, and protect the overall publishing ecosystem.

Read the whitepaper by Confiant

"A huge number of publishers are struggling to survive. Any cost increase or revenue loss is a problem, especially for the long-tail."

— COMSCORE Top-10 SSP

"buyers.json is a no-brainer. If we had been better stewards of our space we might not be where we are today."

— COMSCORE Top-10 SSP

"There is no silver bullet for this problem. There’s a lot of incentive for bad actors. We have to work together to find solutions."

— COMSCORE Top-10 SSP

1.0 Release: June 2021. buyers.json and DemandChain Object are two new buy-side transparency standards being introduced by the IAB Tech Lab (the 3rd being the Ad Product Taxonomy)

Read more →

If successful, buyers.json could open the door to new opportunities:

  • Standardized methods for disclosing buyer information on the client-side.
  • Consistent and common taxonomy of brands and categories.
  • A certification program for accepted ad servers.
  • A centralized registry of buyers.
  • DemandChain, a new object within OpenRTB that would allow sellers to see all parties involved in buying the creative.

Commitment

What do we ask of you?

  • Declare

    Declare

    Sign this pledge to support a unified declaration from top SSPs & Publishers that buyers.json is critical to the fight against malvertising.

  • Commit

    Commit

    Communicate your ongoing commitment discourage or disallow demand sources that choose not to adopt buyers.json.

  • Support

    Support

    Voice your support with IAB Tech Lab, the non-profit consortium drafting the specifications for buyers.json.

Let's all work together to make the advertising ecosystem function at its best.

Add Your Company Name to the buyers.json pledge

Add your name to the list of publishers, DSPs, and SSPs pledging to support buyers.json and eliminate malvertising from the digital advertising ecosystem.

buyers.json and DemandChain Object are ready for implementation to help address challenges around malvertising and nefarious ads

Read more →

Supporters

  • Confiant
  • Los Angeles Times
  • Magnite
  • Pubmatic
  • OpenX
  • The Guardian
  • Index Exchange
  • Total
  • Meredith
  • IAB Australia
  • CVLibrary
  • Sortable
  • Stampen Media
  • MXPlayer
  • Project Agora
  • Equativ
  • OCM Digital Media Agency
  • Hive Media Group
  • Assertive Yield
  • Ranker
  • Mail Online
  • Hashtag Labs
  • Granite
  • Raptive
  • Proper Media
  • Insticator
  • Browsi
  • TeamSnap
  • Longitude
  • diDNA
  • Wattpad
  • Xandr
  • SpotX
  • Chegg
  • World History Encyclopedia
  • Dagsavisen
  • GumGum
  • Mediavine
  • PulsePoint
  • Sonobi
  • Crain
  • Everyday Health Group
  • Engine Media Exchange
  • Mind Tank
  • Ancestry
  • Buymedia
  • Adomik
  • Improve Digital
  • AzerionOne
  • AVForums
  • Snopes
  • Venatus
  • Wunderkind
  • Sharethrough

Webinars, Events, and Other Resources to Help You Spread the Word

What is buyers.json

and how to talk about it with your comms teams
[UPDATED 8th April 2021]

For your comms and legal teams

Our Publisher Survey Q1 2021

from 70 leading publishers from around the world
[22nd April 2021]

See our survey results