Home AdExchanger Talks Podcast: BI Throws Its Weight Behind Ads.txt

Podcast: BI Throws Its Weight Behind Ads.txt

SHARE:

Welcome to AdExchanger Talks, a podcast focused on data-driven marketing. Subscribe here.

Business Insider’s Jana Meron will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming PROGRAMMATIC IO New York conference on October 25-26 in a presentation titled “Insider View From The Publisher.”

Meron is a big booster of ads.txt, the new IAB Tech Lab-created initiative that lets publishers easily broadcast a list of their authorized resellers via a small text file published directly to their servers.

Shortly after the spec came out this spring, BI became the first publisher to employ an ads.txt file, and this week the company put out the second version.

“I’m very bullish on it,” says Meron, whose title is VP of programmatic and data strategy, in the latest episode of AdExchanger Talks. “It creates a virtual handshake between you and a buyer and the exchange, so that you know that wherever you are buying your ad, you are buying it from a source that is trusted by the publisher. There’s no way to fake it, if you will.”

But to be a legitimate solution, all publishers need to adopt the format and buyers need to factor it into their bidding.

Meron says Business Insider is having “a lot of discussions with DSPs about what’s authorized and what’s unauthorized,” and what’s coming to light is this: There are people out there reselling and BI wasn’t aware that it was happening.

“We need to take a step back and say, ‘It’s alright that you did this, but here are the guidelines,'” she says.

Also in this episode: What header bidding hath wrought, the durability of open exchanges and how BI used programmatic to launch an entirely new media brand – the social-first Insider.

Must Read

Monopoly Man looks on at the DOJ vs. Google ad tech antitrust trial (comic).

2025: The Year Google Lost In Court And Won Anyway

From afar, it looks like Google had a rough year in antitrust court. But zoom in a bit and it becomes clear that the past year went about as well as Google could have hoped for.

Why 2025 Marked The End Of The Data Clean Room Era

A few years ago, “data clean rooms” were all the ad tech trades could talk about. Fast-forward to 2026, and maybe advertisers don’t need to know what a data clean room is after all.

The AI Search Reckoning Is Dismantling Open Web Traffic – And Publishers May Never Recover

Publishers have been losing 20%, 30% and in some cases even as much as 90% of their traffic and revenue over the past year due to the rise of zero-click AI search.

Privacy! Commerce! Connected TV! Read all about it. Subscribe to AdExchanger Newsletters

No Waiting for May – CES Is Where The TV Upfront Season Starts 

If any single event can be considered the jumping-off point for TV upfronts, it’s the Consumer Electronics Showcase (CES), which kicks off this week in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Comic: This Is Our Year

Comic: This Is Our Year

It’s been 15 years since this comic first ran in January 2011, and there’s something both quaint and timeless about it. Here’s to more (and more) transparency in 2026, and happy New Year!

From AI To SPO: The Top 10 AdExchanger Guest Columns Of 2025

The generative AI trend generated endless hot takes this year, but the ad industry also had plenty to say about growing competition between DSPs and SSPs. Here are AdExchanger’s top 10 most popular guest columns of 2025 and why they resonated.