Made-for-Advertising Sites—The Quality Crisis Hiding in Plain Sight
How MFA inventory is inflating media costs and what procurement teams need to know
The Association of National Advertisers estimates that $100 billion annually—23% of total programmatic spend—gets wasted on low-quality websites. But here's what's particularly insidious about made-for-advertising sites: they're not technically fraudulent.
When Adalytics examined January 2024 data, they found ads from Colgate, Coca-Cola, and Unilever running on MFA sites through leading DSPs like DV360, Amazon, and Criteo. These weren't small budget tests—a single Fortune 500 company spent over $10 million on MFA sites in just a few months.
The Forbes revelation was a watershed moment. When it emerged that even Forbes—a legitimate premium publisher—had been using MFA-style subdomains specifically to capture programmatic inventory, it became clear how blurred the lines had become.
MFA sites are brilliant at gaming the metrics that matter to automated buying systems. They deliver high viewability rates because they control the entire page environment. They show low fraud rates because the traffic, while low-quality, is technically human. They offer attractive CPMs because their costs are minimal.
What they don't deliver is actual attention or engagement. Research shows that optimizing for attention-based metrics rather than traditional CPMs significantly reduces MFA exposure. When campaigns optimize for attentive seconds per thousand impressions (APM) instead of cost per thousand impressions (CPM), the algorithms naturally steer away from MFA inventory.
The procurement challenge is real. Many brands have mandate to buy inventory at specific CPM thresholds, making MFA sites attractive from a pure cost perspective. But the math doesn't work when you factor in opportunity cost. Every dollar spent on MFA inventory is a dollar that could have gone to publishers creating actual content and building genuine audiences.
The solution isn't just better inclusion lists—though companies like Peer39 have built specific "Made for Advertising Fraud Pages" categories that can be excluded at the prebid level. The real fix requires changing how success is measured. Until the industry moves beyond legacy metrics toward actual business outcomes, MFA sites will continue to capture billions in ad spend.
Sources: Adalytics MFA Site Analysis January 2024; Association of National Advertisers (ANA) Programmatic Transparency Report; Lumen Research "The MFA Report 2024: From Made for Advertising to Made for Attention"; Jounce Media Private Marketplace Analysis; MediaSense MFA Avoidance Guidelines 2024