The past year has seen increased exposure, dialogue and scrutiny over made-for-advertising (MFA) sites. Most recently, Adalytics exposed Forbes’ MFA website, and Jounce Media’s supply chain reports have gathered overwhelming evidence around the prevalence of MFA as a major inventory source for buyers.
The narrative of MFA being misleading to buyers, a suboptimal user experience and seemingly fraudulent inventory is clear. Some buyers and DSPs are taking hard stances against MFA for good reason.
But why is it that MFA continues to thrive?
The reason is embarrassingly obvious: MFA monetization benefits everyone in the ad tech ecosystem that collects a revenue share. That includes both SSPs and DSPs.
Turning off MFA would mean rejecting revenue – a move few can afford.
Inventory scale for SSPs, cheap reach for buyers
MFA has become a spigot through which ad exchanges (aka SSPs) can fuel growth for their primary KPIs: inventory scale and economic efficiency (low prices).
Lila Hunt, VP of display at System1, frames MFA as cheap inventory that hits vanity KPIs like viewability for buyers. Generative AI only makes MFA cheaper to produce and easier to scale, as articles can be generated with almost zero cost.
Some may argue third-party cookie deprecation will eliminate cheap inventory, as buyers will need to find alternative paths for addressability and measurement. But despite the short-term impact, the fundamental problems that support MFA will remain:
- Buyers will seek cheap inventory at scale.
- Ad exchanges will still seek to collect revenue shares and sell cheap inventory at scale.
- MFA will find ways to optimize contextual solutions and continue to game the system.
Premium publishers lose
The real cost of MFA is paid by premium publishers that produce unique, high-quality content and brands that are unknowingly buying MFA.
SSPs and DSPs may publicly say they do not knowingly buy or sell MFA. These platforms put their best foot forward by offering premium curated marketplaces without MFA, and they will block MFA once a buyer requests it.
However, there is no incentive for a DSP or an SSP to self-police. (Disclaimer: I have never worked at a DSP or an SSP, so I am making these observations from my position as a publisher.)
Even efforts to block MFA sites have proven ineffective. Once blocked by a buyer, the MFA site may shut down, but its publisher will spawn a new site.
SSPs and DSPs are rewarded for scale and onboarding new publishers, so the proliferation of new MFA sites is a good thing for them (so long as they aren’t getting flagged for having an overwhelming amount of MFA in their supply chains).
And DSPs have little to gain by blocking an entire SSP for having MFA “slip” into the inventory pool.
Meanwhile, premium publishers are unable to compete for the dollars going to MFA without taking on severe risk. They do not have the luxury of reinventing themselves and spawning a new brand if blocked.
So, as Jounce and Adalytics point out, even some premium publishers have decided to engage in MFA practices to capture back this lost revenue.
In response to being exposed for MFA practices, Forbes has been put in the “penalty box” by agencies … but only temporarily. Jay Friedman, CEO of Goodway Group, said, “To shut off Forbes forever is working against the need to support the ongoing strong journalistic efforts.” While this is a balanced and measured way of thinking, it is questionable if mid-market publishers would be afforded the same goodwill for making this mistake.
MFA taints the open web
Over the past two years, I have observed the gradual shift of “open-market inventory” to be synonymous with MFA. SSPs needing to create curated marketplaces to avoid MFA, the growth of PMPs and the consistent prevalence of MFA in the open auction are evidence of this.
It’s possible programmatic advertising will revert to direct programmatic relationships once we’ve fully capitalized on and absorbed the lessons from the early phases of real-time bidding and the expansive growth of programmatic spending.
However, should we accept MFA as a lasting byproduct of this evolution?
Taking action and accountability
MFA is complicated, and eliminating MFA is equally complicated. There are three root causes that need to be addressed:
- DSPs and SSPs need to stop profiting from MFA.
- Buyers must stop focusing on vanity metrics that MFA helps them hit, but which have little impact on campaign performance.
- There must be consequences to having MFA in your supply chain.
Last year I wrote about the ineffectiveness of revenue shares between publishers and SSPs, and why SaaS models are a better alternative for sustainable and strategic growth. While a SaaS model for SSPs would not completely solve the MFA problem, it would help.
A SaaS model rebalances the scale, making publishers rather than DSPs the primary customers of SSPs.
Consequently, SSPs would lack incentives to generate cheap inventory at scale. Instead, they would pivot toward retaining publishers as their paying SaaS clients. This entails providing value through technology, service and revenue generation capabilities.
This isn’t the only course of action for fighting MFA. Various companies across the industry are already making significant efforts to eradicate the purchase of MFA. Sovrn has taken the leap in providing the SaaS business model with early success. Sustainability initiatives like Scope3 and Sharethrough’s GMP+ Product and hardline stances from major DSPs and agencies are also helping to create measurable consequences to MFA monetization.
The question remains: Are these actions sufficient? What more can premium publishers and sell-side platforms do?
“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community.
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