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