Ads.txt and IMA HTML5 SDK: on iframed content: parent ads.txt is leading?

[bram schoonhoven]

Let me explain the situation and background:
- We make 100's of free html5 games, for example Russian Freecell: http://cdn.htmlgames.com/RussianFreecell/index.html
- This game includes advertizing (Google Adsense for games via the IMA HTML5 SDK). The ads pay for the free game.
- We encourage big portals (like gamesgames.com) to embed/iframe our free games and this is our business model. They get free games, we get the in-game advertizing. See: http://www.gamesgames.com/game/russian-freecell?
- But now Gamesgames.com implemented ads.txt (http://www.gamesgames.com/ads.txt). Without our publisher code.  And now all our advertizing inside our game on their site is blocked (and many more sites).
- We do have ads.txt implemented correctly on our cdn.
- This is so severe that it renders our businessmodel useless now.

I think this was not the goal of ads.txt. It now prevents us from selling our own digital inventory?

It seems somehow the domain of the parent frame/embedder is leading for selecting the correct ads.txt? The game runs on our CDN, so our ads.txt should be leading?

Can you point us in the right direction on how to make sure our ads.txt is used? Please advise. We are also not the only one with this issue: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/adsense/WCHSlzFgIjk

[Joshua Lagonera (IMA SDK Team)]

Hi there,

Kindly note that the IMA SDK is a client-side SDK that handles playing the ads it is served to. It does not handle hosting of ads in any way. That said, I would suggest you to contact your Ad Provider regarding your concern for assistance.

Regards,

Joshua Lagonera

IMA SDK Team

[bram schoonhoven]

Hi, 

Thanks for your speedy response. However ......

Our ad provider is Google Adsense for Games. And they seem to have no clue about this.

Google adsense for games gets a request and I suppose in that request the IMA SDK sents the domain that requests the ad. Could it be you do sent the wrong domain of the parent frame? And not the domain where the game is hosted (our CDN)?

I now feel stuck in the middle between 2 Google Products: IMA SDK and Google Adsense for Games. Neither seems to be responsible? What now?

Bram

Op donderdag 30 november 2017 10:07:17 UTC+1 schreef Joshua Lagonera (IMA SDK Team):

[Joshua Lagonera (IMA SDK Team)]

Hi Bram,

I'm afraid that what you mentioned may be considered as working as intended for the IMA SDK. The SDK sends the Ad Requests based on the page and/or domain requesting the ad. I would recommend for you to contact the pages hosting your games for further assistance on this.

Regards,

Joshua Lagonera

IMA SDK Team

[bram schoonhoven]

Hi Joshua,

Thanks for your answer. I might be, in my opinion the embedded content is requesting the ad and not the page embedding it. It seems a problem where IMA SDK is working as intended, Google Adsense for Games is working as intended, Ads.txt is working as intended. But the whole is not working as intended.

Sure we can request all pages hosting our game to change their ads.txt, but then ads.txt of publishers will grow to a huge monster, I have seem some examples of that already. Not maintainable and no solution anymore to the problem ads.txt is trying to solve. And we depend on the cooperation of the publishers.

For now we will build our own detection script if our Publisher id is in the ads.txt file of the Publisher and disable or pause the game if it is not. Not the best solution but maybe the only one.

Bram

Op vrijdag 1 december 2017 07:08:01 UTC+1 schreef Joshua Lagonera (IMA SDK Team):

[kevin....@sendtonews.com]

Why not just host your ads inside a cross domain iframe under a domain that you can control the ads.txt from?

[bram schoonhoven]

We will try to see if that works. Thanks for your suggestion.

Op vrijdag 1 december 2017 18:53:24 UTC+1 schreef kevin....@sendtonews.com:

[de...@applixir.com]

Did this work or did anyone here find another solution for this problem?

Thanks,

Applixir team.

[Alejandro Torrado]

I would suggest using a very small scraper just to detect if the host ads.txt contains the entries needed, and block the game while providing a link to continue it in a a new window if it's not.