PublisherDesk

<p>This is a WordPress plugin for clients of The Publisher Desk, intended to automatically propagate changes made to The Publisher Desk’s ads.txt file to client websites, while letting them add/retain custom lines as desired.</p>
<h3>Functionality</h3>
<p>This plugin provides management of the ads.txt file (Authorized Digital Sellers), an initiative from IAB Technology Laboratory, geared towards client of The Publisher Desk. Because the administration of a file outside the wordpress directory can pose challenges depending on the WP/Server configuration, the plugin decides on installation whether to use an actual ads.txt file in the root of the domain, or a quasi-ads.txt file built through a WP option and responding to a server request for “/ads.txt” by providing the contents of that option (containing both custom lines and those associated with TPD’s centralalized list).</p>
<p>Troubleshooting an installation:<br />
If you already have an ads.txt file present on your site, the plugin will rename it to ads-txt-original.txt on installation, and re-rename that file back on de-installation. If your site’s wordpress instance doesn’t have access to files outside of its installation directory and you already have an ads.txt file, the plugin won’t be able to dislodge the existing file and allow the management of the one it creates. You can check whether this has happened if you check your site’s ads.txt file directly (site.com/ads.txt) and there’s no line reading:<br />
    “### END TPD ADS TXT ###”<br />
a line that is used by the plugin to demarcate custom entries and The Publisher Desk’s. If this is the case, please deactivate the plugin, rename or remove your existing file, re-activate, and check the file again (you might have to refresh several times depending on caching). If you still don’t see that line and the file looks the same as before the update, please reach out to TPD for assistance.</p>
<p>Final Note: it’s good practice to have a backup of your custom ads.txt lines. We have functionality for retaining your custom lines on plugin updates/re-installs, but it’s good to make sure since it can be a big pain to recollect entries if you lose them.</p>


The Publisher Desk ads.txt

Ads.txt management tool for publishers in The Publisher Desk portfolio.

10up

Jeffrey Paul

Adam Silverstein

Helen Hou-Sandi

Peter Wilson

Jake Goldman

<p>Create, manage, and validate your ads.txt and app-ads.txt from within WordPress, like any other content asset. Requires PHP 7.4+.</p>
<h3>What is ads.txt?</h3>
<p>Ads.txt is an initiative by the Interactive Advertising Bureau to enable publishers to take control over who can sell their ad inventory. Through our work at 10up with various publishers, we’ve created a way to manage and validate your ads.txt file from within WordPress, eliminating the need to upload a file. The validation baked into the plugin helps avoid malformed records, which can cause issues that end up cached for up to 24 hours and can lead to a drop in ad revenue.</p>
<h3>Technical Notes</h3>
<ul>
<li>Requires PHP 7.4+.</li>
<li>Ad blockers may break syntax highlighting and pre-save error checking on the edit screen.</li>
<li>Rewrites need to be enabled. Without rewrites, WordPress cannot know to supply <code>/ads.txt</code> when requested.</li>
<li>Your site URL must not contain a path (e.g. <code>https://example.com/site/</code> or path-based multisite installs). While the plugin will appear to function in the admin, it will not display the contents at <code>https://example.com/site/ads.txt</code>. This is because the plugin follows the IAB spec, which requires that the ads.txt file be located at the root of a domain or subdomain.</li>
</ul>
<h3>What about ads.cert?</h3>
<p>We’re closely monitoring continued developments in the ad fraud space, and see this plugin as not only a way to create and manage your ads.txt file but also be prepared for future changes and upgrades to specifications. Ads.cert is still in the extremely early stages so we don’t see any immediate concerns with implementing ads.txt.</p>
<h3>Can I use this with multisite?</h3>
<p>Yes! However, if you are using a subfolder installation it will only work for the main site. This is because you can only have one ads.txt for a given domain or subdomain per the <a href="https://iabtechlab.com/ads-txt/" rel="nofollow ugc">ads.txt spec</a>.  Our recommendation is to only activate Ads.txt Manager per-site.</p>


Ads.txt Manager

Before, we had a file checked in to our repo for ads.txt.  This meant that when changes needed to be made, someone had to edit the file, commit it and do a PR that needed to be removed. Thanks to this plugin, now the programmatic team can just login to WordPress and manage the Ads file.  No PRs that require a signoff means we can be more nimble and the automated error checking helped us fix a problem as soon as we activated the plugin. 

Great Plugin that helped both the engineering and programatic teams

Awesome plugin !!

Create, manage, and validate your ads.txt and app-ads.txt from within WordPress, like any other content asset.

The Publisher Desk ads.txt vs Ads.txt Manager