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Since the dawn of programmatic advertising, unscrupulous publishers have been devising ways to manipulate digital ad auctions, getting brands to spend money to run ads without putting in the work to develop content that actually brings in viewers.
These spammy websites have had a lot of names over the years, from clickbait to content farms, and despite numerous industry initiatives they are still abundant. This past summer, the industry has been working on a way to operationalize and eliminate some of these bad actors, dubbing them Made for Advertising (MFA) sites: publishers that aren’t outright fraud or hate speech, but aren’t what most advertisers would consider legitimate either.
But some industry sources told Adweek they are unsure whether these efforts will actually help the intractable problem of advertiser spend wasted on low quality publishers. And then there’s the risk of only making matters worse.
An Association of National Advertisers (ANA) study published in June found that 15% of ad spend went toward MFA sites, kicking off the industry focus on the issue. Subsequently, supply-side platforms have removed the sites from their private marketplaces, and the world’s largest media buyer GroupM said it would limit its purchase of ads on MFA sites.
These efforts have most recently culminated in a definition of MFA websites created by four industry trade bodies—the ANA, the 4A’s, the World Federation of Advertisers and the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers—in consultation with two programmatic experts: Chris Kane of Jounce Media and Rocky Moss of DeepSee.io.
The new definition gives five criteria for MFA websites:
- A high ad-to-content ratio
- Rapidly auto-refreshing ad placements
- A high percentage of paid traffic sourcing
- Generic and non-unique content
- Poorly designed websites
Industry sources who spoke to Adweek said that while the definition is a great step toward identifying and potentially eliminating low quality inventory, there is a risk that the efforts to standardize MFAs will just mean bad actors shapeshift to avoid detection. Meanwhile, quality publishers could get dinged.
“The problem is not that people care about MFA, because they definitely should,” said an ad-tech source who asked not to be identified to protect industry relations. “Creating some threshold with some arbitrary rules will have a lot of unintended consequences.”