What is sellers.json and Why Does It Matter?

Join Whitney as she discusses what sellers.json is and why it should matter to digital publishers. Sellers.json was introduced by the IAB to increase the trust of the supply-side of real-time bidding and programmatic buying. If implemented correctly, sellers.json serves as a mechanism to enable buyers to discover who are the entities that are either direct sellers or intermediaries in the selling of programmatic digital advertising. Simply put, sellers.json is a .json file that functions as a way of tracking where the advertising money went. The second part of sellers.json is the OpenRTB SupplyChain object. This allows buyers to see all parties who are selling or reselling a given bid request. Imagine this as a record of what exactly happened to an impression. It uses a node system that identifies every single vendor who participates in the selling of a bid request, including the final buyer. Sellers.json works through a file. In the file, SSPs and exchanges will have to list all their authorized reseller partners along with their seller ID and any detail on the legal entity that owns that company. You may have heard of ads.txt, which is the easiest way to put your ad inventory for sale by a list of approved sellers. Adst.xt is the supply side of the ad exchange, whereas sellers.json is the demand side. If intermediaries are siphoning value from the mix, you might not be competitive at that price as an advertiser. This is why sellers.json is important. In general, the digital advertising space is filled with hundreds (if not thousands) of players who siphon value yet the value they give back to publishers is vague and often hard to quantify. This is why the Display Lumascape is so bloated. It’s important to remember that publishers themselves do not need to have sellers.json on their sites. The entities selling their inventory are the ones who have to implement sellers.json. Additionally, publishers can opt to have their information confidential.