Unleashing the Power of Made-for-Advertising Websites: A Comprehensive Guide

A study published by Jounce Media estimated that Made for Advertising (MFA) websites receive around 12% of programmatic display ad budgets.

MFA websites prioritize generating ad revenue over providing users with a positive and engaging experience. This implies that websites that don’t offer marketers a noticeable return on investment could waste billions of dollars in advertising every year.

What is an MFA website?

Crafted with a primary focus on ad arbitrage, MFA websites prioritize revenue generation over user experience or meaningful content.

For less money than they can generate from selling ad space, they concentrate their efforts on aggressively driving visitors to their websites, frequently via search engines and social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.

Although MFA websites are now a concern for the advertising sector, things could change very soon.

Advertisers must rely increasingly on other signals, such as contextual data, to target their adverts when major browsers stop supporting third-party cookies.

MFA websites are made to place as many advertisements as possible on each page and manipulate user journeys so that users have to click through several pages to access the content.

They do this to maximize the number of advertisements users are exposed to.

This kind of revenue prioritization harms digital advertising’s reputation. An unsettling statistic from a recent ANA research was that 21% of impressions supplied were on MFA websites. 

Comparison Between Audience Acquisition (Arbitrage) and Made for Advertising

Since we already know what MFA is, let’s also learn what audience acquisition means.

Broadly speaking, the act of exploiting price differentials across many markets is known as audience arbitrage. When it comes to audience acquisition, audience arbitrage refers to the practice of gaining audiences for less money than the audience’s revenue generates.

One way to do this is to purchase traffic via advertising and monetize it in different ways.

Let’s compare both the terms based on the following parameters.

Focus:

• Audience Acquisition (Arbitrage): Focuses on acquiring an audience, often through digital marketing channels, to generate revenue through various means.
• Made for Advertising: Focuses on creating content or products that are used in advertising campaigns to promote a brand or product.

Execution:

• Audience Acquisition (Arbitrage): Involves strategic planning and execution of campaigns to attract and acquire audiences, focusing on optimizing costs and revenue.
• Made for Advertising: Involves the creative process of designing content or products to effectively convey a promotional message to the target audience.

Outcome:

• Audience Acquisition (Arbitrage): Success is measured by the ability to acquire an audience at a cost that allows for profitable monetization.
• Made for Advertising: Success is often measured by the effectiveness of the advertising content in conveying the intended message and promoting the brand or product.

Are MFA Websites Harmful?

The programmatic digital advertising industry is highly concerned about Made-for-Advertising websites, which funnel billions of dollars annually to deceptive and/or low-quality websites and content.

Advertisers are particularly uneasy about two aspects: First off, by diverting funds to websites that will never yield a profit, MFA websites can undermine the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns.

Second, the market’s opinion of your business may be gradually damaged by matching your brand to the information and user experiences displayed on Made for Advertising websites.

To be more precise, accidentally posting advertisements on websites designed for advertising can result in the following effects:

• Spending money on ad placements that are just buried under spam. The attraction of any ad placement is diminished on MFA websites since there is frequently more advertisment than content on a particular page. As a result, you wind up paying for a placement that is unlikely to lead to a real interaction.

• An increase of fictitious visitors to your website: To ascertain whether the traffic generated by their advertisements is a genuine outcome of MFA website’s design, advertisers must go further into their website analytics. Websites created primarily for advertising frequently aim to trigger unintentional ad clicks, leading to increased bounce rates and decreased time on the page without any activity. To put it another way, you are paying for unintentional clicks.

• Damaging your brand reputation. MFA websites frequently highlight content forms that advertisers probably don’t want their brands linked with, such as clickbait headlines, contentious or emotionally charged stories, fake news, sexual or explicit photographs, and a long list of other formats. Neglecting this could be bad for your company’s reputation.

• Low ROI, inefficient ad spending, and low conversion rates. Once more, purchasing accidental clicks is a cost associated with advertising on Made for Advertising websites. Most likely, a thorough examination of your down-funnel performance will reveal that the majority of this traffic has no beneficial effect on your company. You may be paying for ad impressions that aren’t seen by users if you use ad stacking and pixel-stuffing techniques.

Is “Made for Advertising” Ad Fraud?

In theory, MFA websites are not unlawful because they do not qualify as a kind of ad fraud. While it leverages strategies also employed in ad fraud schemes, such as pixel stuffing and ad stacking, Made for Advertising websites do not overtly attempt to deceive advertisers by using illicit methods to fraudulently inflate metrics like impressions, clicks, and conversion data.

Thus, Made for Advertising websites are squarely in the grey area that separates authenticity from ad fraud. This is how ad fraud and MFA websites differ from one another.

As previously stated, ad fraud is the unlawful activity of purposefully inflating important advertiser metrics for one’s benefit. The main objective is to defraud advertisers of their money by deceiving them into purchasing from an ad ecosystem their target audience will never view.

How to Avoid Made-for-Advertising Websites?

• Don’t forget to create an inclusion list: This entails restricting the serving of advertisements to domains that demonstrate consistent human traffic.

• Actively exclude MFA websites: As previously said, advancements in LLM models will only make it more difficult to locate these sites. Some technology is available to help find these sites. However, it works best when used in conjunction with a manual site evaluation when creating your inclusion list or, if inclusion lists are not an option, honing your exclusion list.

• Think about if media partners are pushed to prioritize effectiveness over cost-effectiveness: Although each action needs resources, practical measures like raising direct buys, creating JBPs with SSPs and publishers, or simply reevaluating targets to incorporate ad verification data would automatically increase quality and decrease expenditure on MFA websites. Partners should understand that prioritizing effectiveness above efficiency will have advantages or requirements.

How likely is it that marketers will tackle MFA websites head-on?

If historical trends are any guide, the chances don’t seem promising. Despite several chances, marketers have not been able to stop the spread of problems such as MFA websites. Indeed, all signs suggest that MFAs will keep expanding in the years to come.

Ad tech providers are starting to embrace Made for Advertising inventory after previously dismissing it, which is creating a surge in sales potential for these deceptive impressions. Publishers are following suit and hiring MFA experts to increase their ad revenue.

To make matters more difficult, MFA websites are getting better at obtaining traffic at incredibly low prices.