March 27, 2023

The Association of Online Publishers (AOP) has today issued an open letter to advertisers and ad agencies calling for an end to publisher intellectual property (IP) theft, whereby ad tech vendors excessively scrape metadata from publishers’ websites. The AOP says this practice, when done without publishers’ consent, amounts to a theft of publishers’ IP, putting publishers’ sustainability at risk.

The AOP specifically called out content verification vendors, which have privileged access to publishers’ web page data in order to verify ad placement and quality to buyers. Publishers have specifically made this data available to these vendors, in order to demonstrate media quality to the buy-side.

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In the meantime, the AOP has worked with the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) to release an updated version of its Brand Safety Certification, which sets out clearer definitions around publisher data applications, differentiating between legitimate and illegitimate data use.

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