In brief, buyers.json refers to the IAB Tech Lab’s buy-side transparency initiative, which enables the verification of all intermediaries between a publisher and an advertiser in the programmatic demand chain.
What’s Inside
From a technical perspective, buyers.json in a certain way mirrors sellers.json, working in tandem with the OpenRTB DemandChain object, and implies adding a list of intermediaries across the demand chain in a root folder of the ad system’s advertising domain.
Example (visiting the site won’t yield any result):
example.com/buyers.json
Key Benefits
The main purpose of buyers.json adoption lies in the accessibility of a list of ad exchanges, DSPs and other intermediaries that participate in the sale of publishers’ inventory, for verification and review.
Simply put, its implementation enables to detect the so to speak “bad actors”, involved in malvertising practices or other types of online advertising fraud, and eliminate them from the demand chain faster and easier.
Certainly, it would be naive to suggest that the mere implementation of buyers.json and the DemandChain object could eliminate all digital ad fraud risks at a time, however, it would definitely contribute to their mitigation.
Implementation of buyers.json
As mentioned earlier, buyers.json enlists a list of parties involved in the sale of inventory on the ad system’s domain. Similar to sellers.json, the specification implies utilizing specific attributes for the info display, with only several of them being mandatory.
The mandatory attributes in the parent object will namely, include the object array buyers:[, along with the version of the specification (“version”).
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Need more info on how to implement the specification? Check out the detailed guide to buyers.json on the AdPlayer.Pro blog.