Google posted what it is calling a “beta” sellers.json file on June 9. You can find it here. In our view, it’s a half-hearted effort that falls short of industry transparency standards.
It’s Late
Our crawler observed the first sellers.json file in June 2019. Since then, we have observed over 300 different sell side companies post sellers.json files. That includes all of the major exchanges, all of the major intermediaries, and even a handful of publishers.
Not all files are equally complex. Publisher ads.txt files indicate that Google is an authorized seller on over 100,000 different websites and apps, so you might reasonably expect Google to take some extra time creating and deploying its file. But Google is not alone in managing a complex platform. Including Google, there are 10 companies that are authorized sellers on at least 100,000 websites and apps. 9 of these companies posted their sellers.json files in mid-to-late 2019. Google posted its file a full 7 months after these peers.
It’s Incomplete
Given the additional time Google took to organize its file, our expectation is that it would be complete. The IAB’s sellers.json spec indicates that each company’s file must include a comprehensive list of active accounts. But Google appears to exclude a high volume of accounts from its file.
For every exchange we study, we find some seller IDs that are listed in publisher ads.txt files but not in the exchange’s sellers.json file. These are typically disabled accounts that the publisher has not yet removed from its ads.txt file. The incidence of these “unmapped” seller IDs is typically very low, and our marketer clients almost never buy inventory on these unmapped supply paths.
As of June 15, 42% of the websites and apps that authorize Google as a seller have no matching seller ID in Google’s sellers.json file, far higher than industry peers. And unlike peers, Google’s unmapped seller IDs do not appear to be retired accounts. We see our marketer clients actively bidding into many of these supply paths. It appears that Google has chosen to exclude certain active accounts from its sellers.json file.
It’s Heavily Redacted
For the accounts that Google does list in its file, there is an abnormally high share of non-disclosed account information. We see this lack of disclosure in two forms:
First, Google extensively uses an optional “is_confidential” flag to entirely redact information about the seller.
Second, Google commonly lists a seller name but no corresponding seller domain. This makes Google’s file readable to humans, but largely unreadable to DSPs, which rely on well-structured domains to harmonize data across exchanges.
We see both types of redactions in other sellers.json files, but Google’s file is uniquely non-transparent. Only 5% of the accounts listed in Google’s file contain a machine-readable seller domain. The other 95% of listed accounts are functionally useless to buyers.
The delays, ommissions, and redactions in Google’s sellers.json file leave marketers continuing to participate in non-transparent supply paths. We hope that that Google quickly exits its beta release and deploys a file that meets the industry’s minimum standards. And we hope that marketers, agencies, DSPs, and competitive exchanges will pressure Google to put a greater priority on operating a transparent exchange.
We will continue to crawl every sellers.json file and provide daily updates to our SPO Fact Pack and free supply path database.