Inventory Onboarding Requirements

Owned by JB Martinez
Last updated: Apr 10, 2023
2 min read

Overview

In our continuous effort to meet programmatic industry standards, Sharethrough has high standards when it comes to inventory quality.

Sharethrough’s Traffic Quality team continuously monitors publisher activity to detect patterns associated with invalid traffic and non-compliant activity.

 Our best practices for selling inventory are based on the following requirements:

  • Sharethrough prefers domains to have traffic from a balance of different sources with an emphasis on direct traffic.

  • Domains submitted must have a majority of traffic from the following geos that Sharethrough is currently monetizing: US/UK/Canada/EU. We will work to expand our demand and support in other geos such as LATAM, APAC, etc.

  • Sharethrough placements should be set directly in the ad server and should limit its iFrame Depth and passbacks.

  • Domains must have suitable content to ad slot ratio per page (as a reference, ads should not take up more than 30% of a website, as this has been shown to have a negative impact on user experience. infinite scroll would be an exception).

  • Inventory sources should have little to no Invalid Traffic (IVT). High percentages of non-human traffic is regularly monitored and may be flagged by our Inventory Quality Team

  • Inventory sources should not simulate or artificially initiate clicks, impressions or conversions.

  • Ad refresh timeouts should be set to 30 seconds or higher and only refresh when the ad unit is in view.

  • Inventory sources should not be a link farm, content farm, scraper site or similar (must be original content).

  • Sharethrough does not allow adware, toolbar, or other undesirable inventory sources.

  • Publishers wishing to onboard new domains, must be sellers.json and ads.txt compliant

  • Publishers who buy inventory from 3rd party ad networks and reselling it (arbitrage) is strictly forbidden

Banned Site Content

In order to provide advertisers with a brand-safe environment, sites with the following content will not be permitted or monetized:

  • Drug Abuse

  • Adult Content

  • Fake News/Fake Information

  • Hacking

  • Illegal or Questionable

  • Malicious Websites

  • Nudity

  • Phishing and Other Fraud types

  • Potentially Damaging Content

  • Potentially Unwanted Software

  • Racism and Hate

    • Unlawful acts of aggression based on age, race, nationality, ethnicity, religious affiliation, medical condition, gender or sexual image or preference

    • Behavior or commentary that incites such hateful acts, including bullying

  • Sex and Sex Education

  • Supplements and Unregulated Compounds

  • URL Transition Sites (site designed to redirect the user to other sites)

  • Violence/Weapons

Restricted Site Content

Although legal in most regions, restricted content may be considered prohibited content, depending on the nature of the content and the context in which the restricted content is displayed on the site. Sites that contain any of the following content may be restricted:

  • Adult humor;

  • Fantasy sports and/or daily fantasy sports under some state laws;

  • Suggestive content;

  • Sexual health;

  • Sale of alcohol; and/or

  • Sale of prescription drugs.

As a general policy, UGC (user-generated content) sites are only approved on a site-by-site basis. Sites which include UGC as a portion of the page, in particular as comments/votes/etc, are permissible. Publishers must be able to prove that they have certain content monitoring policies in place.

Sharethrough reserves the right to refuse service to new or existing sites, at its sole discretion.