Made for Advertising websites - a new issue in the advertising market

Industry leaders are urging brands to stop placing advertising campaigns on «Made For Advertising» sites (#MFA). However, some experts believe the situation is not so clear-cut.

The advertising industry opposes publishers who attract visitors to their site by buying traffic online and placing clickbait, subsequently profiting by displaying a large amount of advertising to those who fall for the trick. It is believed that such sites provide visitors with low-quality content and dubious results for advertisers. Moreover, these sites are accused of increasing carbon emissions due to the large number of energy-intensive instant auctions for their advertising spaces.

Features of MFA Sites and Their Impact

According to a report by the research company #Adalytics, MFA sites often aggressively refresh the ads displayed, which can potentially lead to visitors seeing the same advertisement thousands of times in one session. This means that brands may pay astronomical amounts for ad impressions calculated per unique user. For example, the company Comcast paid far more for advertising on one of the MFA sites than advertisers pay for ads during the Super Bowl.

However, these sites attract significant advertising budgets not only because of ad reloads. According to the National Advertisers Association (ANA), at the end of last year, MFA sites accounted for about 15% of programmatic budgets, or approximately 10 billion dollars a year (data for #USA).

The Issue of Block Lists and Ambiguous Definitions of MFA

The effort to limit MFA sites is complicated by the lack of industry standards for defining such sites and the erroneous inclusion of regular sites in «block lists».

Some publishers, whose sites have been marked as MFA, say their business is unfairly suffering losses. If advertisers want to place ads on their sites, that is their right.

«If I'm a marketer and I want to buy a lot of cheap audience, and I just need to increase brand awareness, I wouldn't mind if some of my ads appear on these sites because people will see my damn logo,» says Shiv Gupta, founder of the educational company U of Digital, specializing in advertising technologies.

Bad Advertising, Bad Experience

Major market players are urging advertisers to refrain from the practice of placing ads on MFA sites. A representative of the marketing company Jounce Media notes, «The poor user experience and hostile attitude of users towards such sites completely negate the effectiveness of advertising.»

MFA sites typically demonstrate a certain combination of undesirable traits, including: a large amount of advertising, low-quality content, autoplay video ads, and a high percentage of traffic attracted using paid advertising on other platforms.

The 4A's Advertising Agencies Association describes MFA sites as «created for arbitrage,» meaning they «buy» traffic by placing clickbait on other sites and sell their own advertising spaces at a higher price than they paid for traffic attraction. The profit is the difference between the cost of attracting traffic and the cost of advertising impressions.

The New Enemy

MFA sites represent a new challenge for the advertising industry, which previously struggled with bot networks that mimic ad views and ads that appear outside the user's field of view.

Although MFA sites have existed for many years, their share of ad impressions rose to 30% in June last year compared to about 5% at the beginning of 2020. However, according to Chris Kane, founder of Jounce Media, this share began to decline after the publication of the June ANA report, which points to significant expenses and unproductiveness of ad placements on such sites.

Important for Publishers

Market participants must recognize that the current advertising ecosystem may actually encourage the use of dubious sites and gray schemes. Brands wishing to avoid placing ads on MFA sites should prepare lists of trusted publishers and check reports. It is also important to be wary of unusually cheap inventory, which is often a sign of MFA publishers.

Companies like Jounce Media also compile block lists of sites that they have identified as MFA. Such lists vary, and many advertisers do not use them, as it is not an industry standard. Different advertisers have different attitudes towards MFA category sites.

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