Good news for the MFA averse: Buy-side platforms can block made-for-advertising sites by default – if they want to, that is.
AdLib, a self-serve buying platform that connects to DSPs, announced a partnership on Wednesday with Jounce Media, which analyzes programmatic supply chains. The purpose is to ensure that supply purchased through AdLib’s platform is MFA-free and to improve AdLib’s curation capabilities.
The partnership also allows AdLib to make MFA-blocking tools more accessible to midsize buyers, said Founder and CEO Mike Hauptman. AdLib is now offering the ability to exclude MFA from campaigns as a free addition to its general offering.
Most MFA-blocking solutions charge a CPM-based fee, which midsize advertisers typically can’t afford, said Jounce Media Founder Chris Kane.
Plus, as a buying solution that operates as an added layer on top of DSP integrations, AdLib can block MFA regardless of whether a DSP is willing to proactively filter it.
“There’s a lot to be said for defaults here,” Kane said, “and there are very few DSPs with the willingness to have aggressive defaults.”
Building blocks
Jounce, which has been at the forefront of industry efforts to redefine MFA as “made for arbitrage” (rather than “made for advertising,” because what isn’t?) offers an exclusion list of sites that meet its MFA criteria.
These criteria focus on publishers that attract mostly paid traffic and whose sites have a high ad-to-content ratio.
AdLib licenses Jounce’s list and applies it to all campaigns running through its buying platform. Although this exclusion list will be turned on by default, buyers can request not to use it, Hauptman said.
Rather than blocking individual site pages, Jounce’s exclusion list works at the domain level. However, in response to stories like the one about Forbes operating a secret MFA subdomain, Jounce has prioritized getting better at catching subdomains that are associated with MFA activity, Kane said.
To keep up with the whac-a-mole game of identifying new MFA sites, Jounce and AdLib update their exclusion lists daily – including removing any sites that have been erroneously flagged or that have corrected the bad practices that got them labeled as MFA.
Curation collaboration
But blocking is only part of the solution. AdLib also licenses Jounce’s inclusion lists to curate in-demand pools of inventory across trusted publishers.
And AdLib can tap into Jounce’s knowledge of the programmatic supply chain to help buyers control how much inventory they’re buying from specific publishers.
For example, say a tier-three auto company wants to buy CTV inventory only from NBC, Fox, CBS and ABC. Typically, this inventory would be associated with thousands of separate bundle IDs.
DSPs are not engineered to tie these IDs to specific publishers, Kane said. That task typically falls to agencies – and most midtier and smaller marketers can’t afford these services, either.
But part of Jounce’s daily work is analyzing bundle IDs in programmatic deals to determine which IDs are associated with which publishers. As part of this partnership, AdLib gets access to that data as well.
“We basically input a publisher, and on a daily basis, [Jounce] gives us back the whole universe of known IDs [associated with that publisher],” Hauptman said. “So that solves that problem for the midmarket.”
Shrinking MFA’s share
By giving a wider range of advertisers access to these tools, it helps the industry divert ad budgets away from MFA sites and toward deserving publishers.
Such efforts have already contributed to a drop-off in spending on MFA sites. According to Jounce’s analysis, MFA bid request volume peaked at 30% in July 2023, but has since fallen to 10%.
However, that 10% figure can vary widely across individual DSPs, Kane said. And while MFA’s share of ad budgets is shrinking, one in 10 bid requests still come from these sites.
Ultimately, MFA persists because SSPs keep it in the supply chain.
But DSPs cap how many bid requests SSPs can send them per second, Kane said. So, if buyers use solutions like AdLib to block MFA supply, SSPs will notice DSPs aren’t buying as many MFA impressions as they used to and will send more impressions from reputable publishers instead.
“You’ll start to open up access to quality supply that was previously getting filtered out of the bidstream,” Kane said. “This is where the solution, I think, can change the overall shape of the industry.”
