// the find
InteractiveAdvertisingBureau/openrtb
Open RTB is a protocol for real time bidding on digital media
This repo is the official specification for OpenRTB 3.0, the protocol that governs real-time bidding in programmatic advertising. It's a standards document repo, not a code library — you're here to read the spec, not to install anything. Relevant if you're building an SSP, DSP, or any system that needs to speak the same language as the ad exchanges.
The 3.0 spec decouples the transaction layer from the media/ad format layer by splitting off AdCOM as a separate spec, which is a real improvement over the monolithic 2.x structure. Extensions are organized into official and community tiers with a documented lifecycle, so you can tell what's IAB-blessed versus experimental. The ads.cert signed bid requests spec being included here is useful — it's the fraud-mitigation layer that actually matters in production. Active maintenance is evident: last push was June 2026 and community extensions like DSA transparency and Protected Audience support are recent additions that track real regulatory and browser changes.
There's no reference implementation or validation tooling here — just markdown. Anyone building to this spec will spend significant time parsing the document and then writing their own serialization/deserialization layer with no canonical test fixtures to validate against. The v2.x to v3.0 migration story is essentially nonexistent in this repo; the old 2.x spec lives on a branch with no migration guide. Industry adoption of 3.0 has been slow, so in practice most systems still run 2.x, meaning you'll likely need to support both and this repo doesn't help you with that. The community extensions folder is a grab-bag with no clear signal on what's actually used in the wild versus abandoned proposals.