CTV commands premium prices precisely because buyers believe the screen is safe and the audience is real. That belief is enforced by verification: text files that declare who may sell your inventory, supply-chain records, and anti-fraud measurement. Publishers who implement this layer earn access to brand demand; publishers who skip it are filtered out by default.
Register as a publisher and choose your inventory type: CTV app, FAST channel or web video.
We check verification files, audience quality and measurement hygiene before any commercial terms.
Revenue model, payment schedule and reporting granularity are agreed with you in writing.
Ad demand is connected through the integration route that fits your stack: SDK, VAST, SSAI or S2S.
On the open web, brand safety mostly means keeping ads away from harmful content. In CTV it means that plus a stricter supply question: is this ad really running in the app it claims, on a real TV, in front of a human? Brand buyers pay CTV prices only when all three are verifiable. Your content ratings, genre metadata and channel description feed the first part; the technical files below feed the rest.
ads.txt is a plain text file on your web domain listing who is authorized to sell your inventory. app-ads.txt is the same file referenced from your app store listing, extending the standard to apps — essential in CTV, where inventory lives in apps rather than websites. Each line names an ad system, your account id, and the relationship: DIRECT or RESELLER. Publishing and maintaining these files is the single highest-leverage trust action a CTV publisher can take: buyers' systems check them automatically and drop unauthorized supply.
sellers.json is the mirror file published by ad systems: it discloses who the sellers in a transaction are. Together with the SupplyChain object in bid requests, it lets a buyer trace every hop between their money and your screen. As a publisher you do not host sellers.json yourself — but you should verify that your monetization partners publish it correctly and that your account appears accurately, because opaque chains are increasingly blocked by demand-side filters.
CTV fraud is mostly misrepresentation. Device spoofing — cheap mobile or server traffic pretending to be a TV — is the classic scheme, because CTV CPMs are high. App spoofing disguises one app as a premium one. Server farms generate fake streams with fabricated measurement. The common thread: fraud breaks the link between the claimed impression and a real human watching a real TV. Buyers fight it with verification vendors, device-graph checks and supply-path filtering — which is why legitimate publishers must make their inventory easy to verify.
Brand campaigns on CTV routinely require independent measurement: verification vendors confirm viewability, completion, fraud-free delivery and brand-safe context. Their measurement works through standards like OMID inside the player, or through server-side signals for SSAI. Publishers cannot opt out of this — but they can make verification easy: correct VAST event firing, accurate device and app identifiers in every ad request, and stable SSAI measurement. Verified inventory sells; unverifiable inventory gets filtered.
Before demand is connected to a new CTV source, the review covers: app-ads.txt published and matching; content uniqueness and rights clarity; audience quality signals (session patterns, GEO consistency, device distribution); correct VAST responses with full measurement; and no signs of device spoofing or manufactured traffic. Sources that pass get scored continuously afterwards — quality is a standing condition, not a one-time gate. What buyers require from your specific setup is confirmed during onboarding.
Effectively yes. Major brand demand is filtered through app-ads.txt and sellers.json checks, and unverified apps are excluded before price is even considered. It is a small file with outsized revenue impact.
DIRECT means you have a direct account with the ad system listed. RESELLER means the system sells your inventory through an intermediary. Both are legitimate — accuracy is what matters, because buyers compare the files against the actual supply chain.
Yes — fraudsters can spoof your app's identity, selling fake inventory under your name. Current app-ads.txt files and accurate store listings are your defense: they make the fake supply fail verification while yours passes.
Traffic that reports itself as a smart TV while actually coming from phones, emulators or servers. It exists because TV impressions sell at a premium. Verification vendors detect it through device-graph and behavior analysis.
Both. SSAI hides ad calls from the device, which blocks some client-side abuse but creates room for server-side fabrication — which is why buyers demand reliable server-side measurement and why reputable SSAI setups include client confirmation beacons.
Genre and content-rating metadata per channel or show, category exclusions, and accurate app identity. These controls make your inventory eligible for more campaigns, not just safer.
Whenever your monetization setup changes — a new partner, a removed partner, an account change. A stale file that lists departed partners or omits current ones directly suppresses demand.
Yes — verification files are a condition of connecting demand, and the review also covers audience quality and measurement correctness. Specific commercial terms are agreed individually after the review.