Inventory Quality Guidelines

Updated: February 01, 2019

DESCRIPTION

Maintaining the quality of inventory available for sale through the Context Networks CPMN platform (“Platform”) is critical for Context Networks to be able to protect its Buyer and Seller partners and ensure that all parties are compensated fairly for any transaction over the Context Networks platform. In order to protect this marketplace, Sellers making inventory available over the Context Networks platform (including publishers, networks, cooperatives, exchanges, or any other sources of advertising inventory) are required to adhere to these Inventory Quality Guidelines (the “Guidelines”). Please review these Guidelines carefully, and note that Context Networks may, in its sole discretion, update these Guidelines at any time – it is your responsibility to ensure that you adhere to these Guidelines including any updates hereto. If you have any questions about these Guidelines, please contact your Context Networks account manager.

APPLICATION

These Guidelines apply to all channels of Advertising Inventory and all types of media, including display, mobile, native, and video. If you fail to abide by these Guidelines, Context Networks reserves the right to suspend or terminate your access to the Context Networks Platform. Please note that these Guidelines are not an exhaustive list of prohibitions, but rather represent platform principles – Context Networks reserves the right to reject, suspend, or remove from its Platform any inventory in its sole discretion, regardless of whether a basis for removal is listed here. These Guidelines do not limit Context Networks’s discretion in any way.

LEGAL COMPLIANCE
  • You must not make available over the Context Networks Platform inventory on any media that violates, or otherwise promotes the violation of any applicable law, rule, or regulation in any relevant jurisdiction.
  • You must disclose clearly and obtain effective consent for, any data collection, sharing, and usage that occurs on any media as a result of your use of the Context Networks platform. In particular, you must provide end users with clear and comprehensible information about, and obtain effective consent for, the use of technologies such as cookies on the end user’s device, where such activity occurs through your use of the Context Networks platform. You must provide users with an opportunity to opt out of data collection for advertising purposes, and must pass any opt out choice to Context Networks.
  • With respect to any Advertising Inventory originating in the European Economic Area or Switzerland, you shall not send or transmit any bid requests to Context Networks that contain or reflect: (a) any special categories of personal data (as set forth in Article 9(1) of the General Data Protection Regulation), including but not limited to data related to racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, health status, or sexual orientation, or (b) any personal data relating to criminal convictions or offenses (as described in Article 10 of the GDPR).
  • You must ensure that any Ad request sent to Context Networks does not contain any information that enables direct identification of an end user (such as their name, username, or email address). Ad requests must only contain cookie or device related identifiers.
  • With respect to any Advertising Inventory originating in the United States, you shall comply with the Video Privacy Protection Act and shall obtain all applicable end user consents prior to passing any video content viewing behavior (“Viewed Content Data”) to Context Networks.  You shall notify end users that you engage in Viewed Content Advertising and shall provide users with an opportunity to opt out. Context Networks shall be permitted to pass any Viewed Content Data to its Buyers and technology vendors.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY INFRINGEMENT

You must not make available over the Context Networks platform inventory on any media that includes content for which you lack the legal right or authority to make available. Additionally, you must not make available inventory on any media that includes any material that infringes, or otherwise enables or facilitates the infringement of the intellectual property rights of any third party (including rights conferred or otherwise protected by patents, copyrights, trademarks, or trade secrets).

INVENTORY AUTHORIZATION AND REPRESENTATION

For inventory covered by published ads.txt or app-ads.txt files, you may send us requests only if your Context Networks account ID is listed in the respective file.

All inventory you send us must be completely and accurately described, and may not be misrepresented in any way. Without limitation, this means inventory attributes, including referring URLs, app bundles or IDs, ad formats and sizes, client characteristics (IP addresses, user agents, device IDs, geolocation data), and Payment ID or pchain data, must be correct in Ad requests you send to our Platform. (However, zeroing out the last octet of client IP addresses, restricting precision of geolocation information, or other redaction as strictly necessary to prevent the transmission of PII is acceptable.) You may not omit any mandatory information.

You may not engage in bid jamming. That is, you may only send us a single Ad request via a given integration for any particular impression opportunity on a given placement and Ad size. For example, if we do not fill a particular request, you may not then issue a subsequent request with the same fundamental characteristics except for the price floor.

Video inventory must represent linear video placements or authorized and properly declared formats such as outstream units. In-banner video is never acceptable.

INVALID IMPRESSIONS

Any impression made available for sale on the Context Networks platform must result from human activity. For example, you must not make available any inventory on the Context Networks platform:
  • using automated means to generate the impression, including spiders, scripts, or other non-human agents;
  • by offering any incentives to interact with an Ad;
  • automatically spawning an impression, or otherwise hijacking an end user’s device or browser;
  • using automatic Ad refreshes (unless instigated by an end user refreshing the seller’s media); or
  • using any method whatsoever designed to fraudulently, deceptively, or artificially inflate the number of impressions, clicks, or other payable actions.

If your inventory is located in or on an application (including a mobile application), you must not: (a) substantially overwrite the Ad placements on any third party media via such application; and (b) rearrange the content of any third party media via such application.

TRANSPARENCY

  • You must not make available any inventory that is not fully transparent to Context Networks, without Context Networks’s prior express consent. Your inventory may, at your discretion, be made non-transparent to Buyers over the Context Networks platform, but we require full transparency in order to be able to assess the quality of the inventory that you are making available. Similarly, you must accurately represent the location of your inventory to Context Networks to enable Context Networks to assess the quality of your inventory.
  • The url or app ID/bundle that you deliver to Context Networks must be where the Advertisement will be displayed.
  • You may not make inventory available in double iframes.

VIEWABILITY

  • Buyers purchase impressions so that their Advertisements may be viewed by users of your media. Accordingly, all Ad Inventory that you make available must be viewable if a user scrolls to the portion of your media on which that inventory is located – you may not “stack” any inventory, hide any inventory behind other content of any type, make inventory invisible by rendering it in a small iframe, or use CSS or Javascript to prevent the inventory from actually appearing. Your inventory must not, without Context Networks’ prior express consent, automatically reload after a certain period of time without being refreshed by the user.
  • Some Buyers may attempt to determine the viewability of impressions available over the Context Networks platform. You must not obscure or otherwise interfere with any such attempts to determine the viewability of your inventory.

CONTENT GUIDELINES

You must not make available any inventory on media that contains, displays, promotes, includes, or consists of any of the following:
  • Obscene, pornographic, or adult content, including full nudity, or depictions or descriptions of sexual acts
  • Graphic or excessively violent content (games and music may be allowed on a case-by-case basis, with Context Networks’ prior express consent)
  • Discriminatory content, including content that promotes discrimination by race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, disability, gender, age, or sexual orientation
  • Harassment, bullying, threats, or similar content that advocates against any group, organization, or individual
  • Controlled substances, including illegal drugs and paraphernalia. This restriction does not include Ads for medical or recreational marijuana in jurisdictions where they may be legal under State law.
  • File-sharing or torrent sites
  • Manga/Anime, unless you own the intellectual property rights to such content
  • Hacking/cracking
  • Sale of pirated goods
  • Content that compensates users for clicking on Ads or offers, performing searches, or surfing websites
  • Inventory that changes user preferences or browser settings, or that initiates downloads without the user’s consent
  • Inventory that redirects users to unwanted websites
  • Inventory that contains or loads pop-ups or pop-unders
  • Rotating video inventory that is loaded into display inventory slots
  • Without Context Networks’ prior express consent, you must not make available, any inventory that contains, displays, promotes, includes, or consists of the following:
    • Firearms, weapons, and ammunition
    • Memes

You may not sell inventory located on or injected onto other content via plugins, toolbars, application extensions, VPNs, or proxies, or on a website that derives its inventory from these types of sources. Any such injection of Advertising onto another site’s content is expressly prohibited.

Placements must comply with the Better Ads Standards, and sites or apps may not engage in any of the “least preferred ad experiences” as identified by the Coalition for Better Ads.

The above content guidelines are not an exhaustive list – Context Networks may reject any individual media on which Ad Inventory is being sold.