The VRA Charter.

VerifiedAudiences.com accepts no revenue, payment-in-kind, sponsorship, or other consideration from any audience seller whose data it rates or could rate. There is no tier, product, package, or arrangement under which a seller may pay the organization, directly or indirectly.

This prohibition extends to founders, directors, officers, employees, contractors, and equity holders of VerifiedAudiences.com acting on its behalf. Personal investments in rated sellers must be disclosed and held in blind structures during the period of association.

The Independence Board, composed entirely of members not employed by VerifiedAudiences.com, reviews compliance with this Article on at least an annual basis. The audit findings are published.

Buyers — including advertisers, agencies, and analytics teams — may consult the public registry, hit the scoring API, run the open-source private-audit client, and display the VRA Grade in their work, free of charge, for any volume of usage in the course of their own business.

Sellers — audience suppliers of any kind — may submit samples for assessment, receive a grade, license the VRA Certified mark, and request re-rating after methodology updates, free of charge, in perpetuity. No tier exists under which a seller may purchase a higher grade, expedited review, or any other modification of the standard process.

The methodology document is published under CC BY-SA 4.0 and may be replicated, cited, and re-implemented in full by any party, with attribution.

VerifiedAudiences.com may accept revenue only from the following categories:

• DSPs, ad-tech infrastructure, and platforms that license the VRA Grade for bid-time integrations, supplier qualification, or buy-side decisioning — paying on behalf of the buy-side, not the rated seller.
• Industry research firms, equity research, and regulatory bodies that consume the data feed for diligence and oversight purposes, and which are not themselves rated by VRA.
• Charitable foundations, endowments, and neutral third parties whose mission is aligned with the integrity of the standard.
• Training, certification, and educational programs that do not involve assessment of any audience.

No revenue source listed above receives any influence over the methodology, the grade of any specific seller, the timing of any review, or the content of the registry. Concentration limits apply: no single funder may exceed 18% of annual revenue.

Revenue figures, by category and by funder, are published annually in the Independence Board audit.

Each version of the VRA Methodology is published in full prior to any grade being issued under it. The published document is the methodology; nothing is held back.

Once published, a methodology version is immutable for the duration of its support period — no fewer than 18 months past supersession by a newer version. Errata are tracked publicly but do not change the published document.

Methodology versions are released according to a public calendar with at least 90 days of public review prior to becoming effective. Any party may submit comments, replication results, or proposed amendments during the review period.

Any party may replicate the grading pipeline using the published methodology, the published benchmark inputs, and a sample of audience data. Discrepancies must be addressed by errata or version update — not by silent change.

The grade of any seller or segment is determined solely by the methodology applied to the inputs submitted or observed. No other consideration enters the calculation.

No grade may be expedited, withheld, modified, or withdrawn at the request of any party — including the rated seller — except as permitted by Article VII (Disputes) and accompanied by a published explanation.

All grades, including failing grades (D and F) and unrated/non-cooperating sellers, are listed publicly in the registry. Hidden grades are not permitted. A seller may decline to submit a sample but may not pay or contract to be omitted from the registry.

Any sample data submitted by a seller for the purpose of assessment is processed within an isolated environment, destroyed within 72 hours of grade issuance, and never used for any other purpose — commercial, analytical, or methodological.

Buyer-submitted match-files, when used for assessment of non-cooperating sellers, are subject to the same destruction terms. The buyer's identity is not disclosed to the rated seller.

The private-audit client is open-source under Apache 2.0 and uses oblivious pseudo-random function (OPRF) protocols to prevent VRA from observing buyer IP-level data at all. Aggregate match rate, volume, and timing are the only quantities revealed.

Any rated seller may dispute a grade within 30 days of issuance. Disputes are reviewed by a panel including at least one member of the Independence Board.

A dispute may result in: (a) regrading using corrected inputs; (b) a methodology errata that affects all similarly-rated sellers; or (c) confirmation of the original grade. The dispute outcome and the panel's reasoning are published.

A seller may not be re-rated to a higher grade than originally issued without a corresponding methodology errata that would affect other rated sellers similarly. Individual exceptions are not permitted.

This Charter may be amended only by the Independence Board, by a vote of two-thirds majority, with at least 60 days of public notice prior to the effective date. Proposed amendments are published immediately upon submission to the Board.

Articles I (Independence), II (Free for both), and III (Funding) may not be amended in any manner that reduces the scope of those commitments. They may be expanded, clarified, or strengthened only.

This Charter is binding upon VerifiedAudiences.com, its successors, and assignees. Sale, merger, or restructuring of the organization does not release it from these obligations; any acquirer accepts the Charter as a condition of acquiring the standard.