Primis, the leading Video Discovery platform for global publishers, today announced the launch of Sellers.guide (https://sellers.guide), an industry-wide initiative designed to bring a heightened level of transparency to the ad tech ecosystem.

The state of transparency in ad tech has categorically improved over the last few years, with initiatives such as ads.txt and sellers.json providing a healthy step in the right direction. While much of the industry growth is due to those tools, they remain overwhelming and inaccessible to many.

Sellers.guide is an automated tool that compares ads.txt files with sellers.json and provides simple and useful feedback to help publishers and buyers gain insights into who is really buying and selling inventory in any domain.

“We’ve been a part of this industry for a long time. Long enough to feel that it is an integral part of who we are. Transparency is paramount for the success of our industry. And yet, the tools created to promote it are hard to grasp,” said Rotem Shaul, co-CEO of Primis. “Our aim is to simplify, explain, elucidate, illuminate and help members of the ad industry navigate their way through the technological complexity on their journey to transparency.”

Sellers.guide automatically cross-references ads.txt files with sellers.json files so that publishers can better understand how they can optimise their ads.txt files. Publishers can use Sellers.guide to recognise the obfuscation that exists behind those “DIRECT/RESELLER” labels - and avoid unauthorised reselling, domain spoofing, latency and revenue loss.

A recent survey of publishers by Primis revealed there is a significant gap between reality and perception among many publishers. When asked How Many Sellers Currently Sell your Inventory? 56% of respondents said 2-13 and 25% said 14-34. Based on an examination of Ads.txt files those numbers do not reflect reality.

“Most publishers have 90% more sellers than they realise,” continued Shaul. “The reason for this gap is that publishers are not properly maintaining their ads.txt file. When code is reviewed, they will find so many more sellers than they realised, including many resellers posing as direct sellers. Most publishers have no idea this is going on, and it’s a huge problem for the industry.”

Today, publishers have widely adopted ads.txt to reduce the risk of counterfeit inventory and establish an honourable digital programmatic supply chain.

The challenge today is that maintaining an ads.txt file is a manual and technically challenging process that most publishers don't fully understand. Despite the great adoption of ads.txt files, if they are not maintained, they can’t fulfil their mission and eventually further complicate the issue.

Sellers.guide has four primary features:

1. Analyse domain - A tool for publishers or potential buyers to search and get a complete analysis of specific domains. This analysis includes a transparency score, flags that point to common problems, and actionable insights on how to fix them. Also included is a complete list of the seller domains that have access to selling the inventory.
2. Validate seller - Copy and paste ads.txt lines in bulk to analyse existing or potential vendors. This tool helps build trust between publishers and vendors, especially with new relationships.
3. Industry highlights - Every week, Sellers.guide scans 116K domains and creates industry benchmarks so that every publisher can see how they are doing compared to the industry.
4. Resources - Blogs, wikis and FAQs about ads.txt and sellers.json to make it more accessible and understandable.

Sellers.guide was built to serve and improve all parties in the ad tech industry. The initiative is being offered free of charge and is open to collaboration from all members of the ad tech industry.