How to avoid violating the law on digital ads while working with Travelpayouts                        

What's the law on digital ads?

On September 1, 2022, a new clause of the federal law on digital ads came into effect. All advertisers must now:

• Label ads aimed at the Russian audience.
• Specify the advertiser and/or page of the site that contains information about that advertiser.
• Report to the Unified Internet Advertising Registry (UIAR). This requires obtaining a special identifier (token) for each piece of advertising material and submitting information about its placement, all via the Advertising Data Operator (ADO).

Do Travelpayouts partners have to label their tools and report on their advertisements?

Links, banners, and some widgets from the Travelpayouts partnership platform are subject to legal requirements. If these tools are aimed at the Russian audience, then:

• they must be labeled
• partners should report to the Unified Internet Advertising Registry (UIAR).

How can partners avoid violating the law on digital ads while working with Travelpayouts?

In order for Travelpayouts partners to be able to comply with the laws, while taking a minimum number of actions, we:

• We've added the label and information about the advertiser to the widgets.
• In the “Tools” → “Links” section of each partner program, we’ve added a field with information about the advertiser, which is required by the advertising data operator. You can place this information on the page you are adding affiliate links to with two clicks: “Copy” → “Paste”.
• We’ve added functionality to help us send reports to UIAR for you on links and Travelpayouts widgets placed on your Projects (websites, groups in social networks, etc.) and falling under the law. To do this, fill out the Legal Requirements form. You will find it in your profile settings if you have at least one Project with the content language specified as “Russian”.

Note: we’ll only report on those partners who will fill in the form in the personal account. And we’ll only report on ads using Travelpayouts tools. You can report on ads yourself or not do it at all. To do so, click “Decline this offer” in the “Legal Requirements” tab in your profile settings.

In addition, we’ve added new functionality for most of the programs in the catalog, which have tools that fall under the advertising law. In the future, we’ll add other brands as well.

What partners should do to make Travelpayouts report on ads for them?

So that we can start reporting on your ads that have Travelpayouts tools and label partner links and widgets:

1. Sign up for Travelpayouts. If you already have an account, you don’t need to create a new one, just log in to your personal account.
2. Go to your profile settings and select the “Legal Requirements” section. The section will only be available if you have at least one Project that has Russian as one of the selected content languages. You also need to set up the Payout method‎‎.
3. Select your country of residence. If you are an individual person, specify the country of your current legal residence. If you are a private entrepreneur or a legal company, specify your country of registration.

4. Specify your status: individual person, private entrepreneur, or a legal company. Your chosen status depends on the information we need from you.
5. Fill in all required fields and click “Save Changes”.

6. If all the information is filled in correctly, you will receive a notification that we received your data. The “No data is filled out” label will change to “We’ll handle ads reporting for you”.

From now on, your widgets will be labeled, and we’ll report on your ads with Travelpayouts tools to UIAR. You can change the data in the form an unlimited number of times.

How to work with partner tools and comply with the new law on the digital ads

If you have filled out the “Legal Requirements” form and are:

• working with widgets, continue to work with these tools as before. The only difference is that, now, some widgets will be labeled and contain information about the advertiser.

• working with partner links, continue to create and place partner links as usual. An important point: you should add information about the advertiser to the page with partner links. This information is available to copy from the Links configuration form. 

You need to first copy the Link itself and insert it in the content of your resource. Then copy the disclaimer and add it to your placement. The disclaimer can be inserted right next to the link or at the end of the text.

• working with banners, it's up to you to label these tools and report on them or not. Unfortunately, we don’t yet automatically label Travelpayouts banners and don’t report these ads to UIAR.
• working with WhiteLabel, API, or Travel App, then you don’t have to do anything. These tools don’t fall under the new law. Continue using them without any changes.

Learn more about partner links and widgets in the Links to travel brands and Brands’ widgets articles.

What happens to links and widgets that have already been posted?

If you've placed links or widgets on your site or other resources before the new feature was rolled out in Travelpayouts, they will not be automatically updated.

This means that, even if you have filled in the data, we will not be able to send information to UIAR on old links and widgets that don’t contain the ADO special identifier (token). In addition, any widgets that have already been placed will not be labeled.