Publishers profit from content farms

  • Well-known publishers, including SPIN and The Jerusalem Post, generate revenue from programmatic advertising placed on special subdomains.
  • These subdomains are filled with articles produced on content farms and managed through special platforms such as Content IQ and Cortex Media Group, creating significant advertising traffic.
  • Although these practices are profitable for publishers now, their use may tarnish their reputation.

«Revealing the Secrets of the Earth: A Journey to the Deepest Hole»

This is the title of an MFA article (#Made-For-Arbitrage), about a failed Soviet scientific expedition to drill a borehole tens of thousands of feet deep into the Earth's crust.

But in a similar style, one could choose a headline for another revelation in the advertising market that you are reading now.

The aforementioned story appeared on historicalgenius.com, an MFA site managed by the monetization provider Content IQ, owned by Perion, the parent company of Undertone, CodeFuel, Vidazoo, and Hivestack.

The same article, word for word, with the same images (and a ton of ads added), can be found on recommended.spin.com, a subdomain located on the main site of the music publication SPIN, but also compiled by Content IQ.

So what does this all mean?

Promotion

Well-known publishers such as SPIN, The Jerusalem Post, International Business Times, and Benzinga, collaborate or have recently collaborated with services that generate revenue from programmatic ads using paid traffic from social media. MFA subdomains are filled with MFA articles created by content farms.

These publishers have leveraged the good reputation of their old domain names, existing since the 90s, to secretly profit from junk content that they did not write themselves.

The startup Sincera, which collects and provides metadata for the ad tech ecosystem, noticed this practice while helping #The Trade Desk investigate traffic anomalies on several domains owned by a single publisher.

Digging deeper, Sincera discovered strange behavior across several URLs using the subdomains of major publishers. These subdomains were created by publishers and set to receive traffic from servers managed by third parties.

These third parties turned out to be Content IQ, owned by Perion, and another called Samyo News, a "media company" owned by Cortex Media Group, which is itself owned by the Israeli company Viewbix. Content IQ and Cortex directly manage all paid traffic acquisition and arbitrage operations occurring on these subdomains.

The product of these companies is #MFA sites on a self-service basis, where publishers receive a share of the profits for "covering."

«The publisher creates a subdomain and points it to their server — and that's it», says Sincera co-founder Mike O'Sullivan. «Then they just wait for the first check to come in».

Since DSPs and #SSPs usually operate on top-level domains, not subdomains, they may mistakenly consider these MFA subdomains as quality inventory.

Nevertheless, Content IQ and Cortex list these ad tech companies as their "partners" on their websites (for publishers who want to check).

Meanwhile, the code of the sites magazine.jpost.com and recommended.spin.com is filled with bidders such as Vidazoo, Undertone, #Criteo, Media.net, Minute Media, #OpenX, Rubicon (now #Magnite), Connatix, #PubMatic, AppNexus (now Xandr), #TripleLift, Sovrn, #Index Exchange, Sharethrough, Smart AdServer (now Equativ), 33Across, Yieldmo, and #Google (the list goes on).

You Got Played

So, what does it look like?

If the sites spin.com or jpost.com, for example, feature high-quality music and news materials that one would expect to find there, along with regular ads, the subdomains monetized by Content IQ and Cortex Media Group (recommended.spin.com, feeds.spin.com, and magazine.jpost.com) are pure MFA sites.

For SPIN, Content IQ took random articles to fill these subdomains directly from its so-called portfolio of media brands, including Historical Genius, Boredom Therapy, and Pet Fanatic. Cortex does the same for The Jerusalem Post from its portfolio of equally magnificent sites, including Herald Weekly, Daily-Stuff, and Daily-Choices.

Both Content IQ and Cortex run unaffiliated Facebook pages, pouring money into Facebook ads to drive visitors to subdomains that generate virtually zero organic traffic.

So... this is similar to what #Forbes was doing until last month, when it was exposed by #Adalytics, right?

Well, not quite.

Business as Usual

What's happening here is different from the Forbes situation. Yes, Forbes secretly launched an MFA subdomain and switched the URL to bypass DSP and SSP audits. Buyers and their partners were rightly outraged.

But at least Forbes used its own content for slideshows on www3.forbes.com.

Here, it's worse. Now publishers are just putting up the same third-party MFA materials taken from other MFA sites.

«Yes, you could say this is just arbitrage», says O'Sullivan. «But one of the main reasons this works is the long-standing trust in the main site. They rely on people seeing this URL, recognizing it, and thinking everything is fine».

Weird Experience

Advertising on an MFA subdomain is messy and aggressive, with a high volume of ads and frequent updates. The content is low-quality and confusing.

Take, for example, this Spanish-language article: «Conmovedoras fotos del funeral de la reina Isabel que pasarán a la historia» (which translates to «Moving photos from Queen Elizabeth's funeral that will go down in history»).

Facebook ads purchased by Weird Little Tales, a page managed by Content IQ, directed people to this article on the recommended.spin.com site. There, the SPIN logo is clearly displayed in the top left corner, implying that this site is indeed part of spin.com.

But that's where the resemblance to the real spin.com ends.

The article itself (taken from Mental Flare, another site managed by Content IQ) displays all the hallmarks of an MFA, including excessive image use and a high ad density diluted with a small amount of content. It takes more than a minute of active scrolling to reach the bottom of the page, but, oops, there is no bottom.

The page is an infinite scroll of MFA, and it never ends.

Buckle up as you scroll, because you're in for a wild ride: at the supposed end of the article, an #Outbrain widget first appears with sponsored (paid) links "You might also like," followed by another Spanish-language article filled with 1930s photos (for some reason). After another Outbrain widget comes another Spanish-language article about a man who "came up with a genius plan to stop people from mowing his lawn" (whatever that means), then you scroll past another Outbrain widget and land on another Spanish-language article about "the guys from Mötley Crüe being crazy in the 1980s... and these photos prove it" — which, to be fair, is at least somewhat related to music.

But maybe it's just an unfortunate accident.

«If you go to spin.com, you'll see that it's full of great music content», says Sincera co-founder Ian Myers. «If you go to one of the subdomains, you'll see they're aggressively monetizing unrelated Spanish-language articles from Facebook with so many ads on the page that some of them can't even load — and this is just one example».

A SPIN representative told #AdExchanger that the publication «terminated our relationship with Content IQ and is currently closing the subdomains they managed». SPIN did not say what prompted this «process» or when it began.

International Business Times and Benzinga did not respond to requests for comment. They also actively handed over their subdomains to third parties for ad arbitrage until the Forbes scandal broke in April.

Going back a bit, Sincera observed that Newsweek, USA Today, Dailymotion, Parade, PopSugar, and Refinery29 intermittently activated and deactivated MFA subdomains from 2020 to late 2023. Although these subdomains have since been deactivated, some of them are not deleted but are merely dormant — this means that the infrastructure still exists, and if these publishers decide to re-launch the third-party arbitrage machine, it will be up and running in no time.

A Newsweek representative told AdExchanger that the publication had «limited relations» with Content IQ from 2020 to 2022, during which time «a small amount of traffic was directed to Newsweek and was clearly classified as "paid traffic" in our regular disclosure and TAG audit process».

Publisher's Problem

None of this is very good.

But here's the question: can you blame publishers for trying to make money? It's cold out, layoffs, and unsympathetic private equity owners are at the helm of the publication.

But leveraging the quality of a reputable domain to secretly generate revenue from MFA is not the smartest strategy in the long run.

For example, there are tools in the market to detect MFA sites. Sincera recently created a tool for marking MFA subdomains based on pre-bid, which The Trade Desk plans to use.

But even so, publishers have little incentive to stop doing this.

«More thorough control is a positive step, but as long as this type of arbitrage is seen as profitable, it will continue», said Myers, then paused. He opened the developer console window to demonstrate the unusually high ad load on recommended.spin.com, which reached over 3,000 ad requests on a single page in less than 60 seconds.

«I have to say», Myers said after a moment, «my computer is getting very hot right now».

To Publishers

Publishers should understand that such practices can lead to the loss of trust from both users and advertisers. But salaries have to be paid, so... Everyone decides for themselves.

Forecast

Content quality control on sites will increase. For example, DeepSee has already released a similar product.

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