What Is A Made-For-Advertising Site?

Like it or not (probably not, but I think it’s okay because it gives me the budget to buy Bionicles), advertising is the backbone of the modern internet.

Websites around the world earn money and keep the servers running by allowing firms like Google to run their client’s adverts on their website. In fact, Google Display Network alone runs ads on over 2 million websites.

Given that digital advertising is now a $600 billion industry, there are bound to be people who try to game the allocation system for a slice of the pie.

This is why something called “made-for-advertising sites” have been causing a big stink in digital marketing recently. 

Why? Well, because 10% of advertising programmatic ad budget is spent on these websites, and almost all of it is wasted, due to low relevancy and conversion rates.

So let’s examine exactly what made-for-advertising sites are, why they’re bad for your budget and how to stop your ads appearing on them.

Made-for-advertising site definition

A made-for-advertising site (or MFA site for short) is a website designed primarily to host advertisements and generate revenue through clicks rather than provide meaningful content. These sites often feature minimal, low-quality content and prioritise maximising ad impressions and interactions.

These MFA websites are then submitted to ad publishing networks like the Google Adsense programme to start earning revenue.

As with most modern advertising platforms you don't choose specific websites to advertise on, instead relying on Google placing your ads on the right sites to find your ideal prospects, this leads media buyers (like myself) to unwittingly pay the owner of the MFA site to advertise on their website.

Are made-for-advertising sites bad?

Yes, made-for-advertising sites are bad for two reasons.

The first is that they provide the user with an incredibly poor experience. 

Usually, ads take up a significant portion of the UI on an MFA site, meaning the sites are hard to navigate. 

Also, the quality of the content on a MFA site is usually low, or in more recently created MFA sites, likely to be created purely by AI. 

Remember, they’re not trying to provide you with a good experience, they’re just trying to get as many eyeballs on the ads as possible.

Speaking of eyeballs, the second reason that MFA sites are bad is that someone out there is paying for those precious, precious eyeballs. It’s estimated that 94% of brands who advertise online have their ads featured on MFA sites, which convert at a significantly lower rate than other ad placements. 

The reason these sites are allowed to continually serve ads is because advertisers are prioritising viewability rather than core ROI, and as such, MFA sites appear 'successful' in your inventory because they generate tonnes of viewability.

But when you filter these websites out, as Flywheel did in an empirical test on the effects of removing MFAs from your inventory, you can see a massive increase in bottom-of-the-funnel conversions, you know, the thing advertising is supposed to drive!

Are made-for-advertising sites fraud?

Given that you’re a sweet summer child, you’re probably thinking ‘wait, isn’t this against the rules to game the system like this?’.

Yes, made-for-advertising sites are technically a form of ad fraud. 

In Google Adsense’s terms and conditions, there are multiple indications that low quality MFA sites should not be allowed to run ads. 

But this is one of the many types of fraud where no one actually goes to jail for it, and many sites slip through the net.

But just how many sites are out there built only for tricking ad publishers?

How many made-for-advertising sites are there?

There’s no way to tell for sure how many MFA sites there are out there.

However, research suggests that over 20% of global ad impressions are shown on MFA sites, so it’s fair to assume they occupy a not insignificant amount of space within the digital ad ecosystem. 

Made-for-advertising site examples

So if I can’t tell you an exact number of websites out there, how do you know what exactly is a MFA site? Well, I won’t link specific sites here (so as not to pollute my link profile for this website) but I will breakdown guidance on the three main ways to identify MFA sites.

Ad density

The first way to detect an MFA site is the density of ads. Most normal websites should have a small number of non-intrusive and relevant ads. If the ads take up more space than the actual content of the page, then there is a good chance the site was made specifically for harvesting ad money. Another sign is ads repeatedly refreshing, as each ad shown gets the website owner more money, so they typically refresh them quickly for maximum revenue 

Content quality

This is more nebulous but the quality of content on MFA sites is much lower than would be traditionally expected. If you find yourself bombarded with ads but without an answer to the question you came looking for, then there is a good chance you have landed on an MFA site.

Navigation and linking

This is a big one. Have you ever been on a website and it’s asked you to click ‘see more’ to finish an article, or the content is spread over multiple webpages? That’s usually a sign you are on an MFA site. Another dead giveaway is links to articles like ‘you won’t believe what X celebrity looks like now’, which seem to revel in the unstoppable and completely reasonable ravages of time.

How to stop my ads appearing on MFAs?

As marketers, we have an obligation to spend our clients’ money as effectively as possible. We also have an obligation to repeatedly tell everyone we work in marketing and pretend we do more than just update the company TikTok page and drink Aperol Spritzs (Spritzes? Spritzese?)

Back to MFA ads, there’s basically three schools of thought on how to tackle them when it comes to programmatic advertising.

First, you can use ad verification tools (like Integral Ad Science or DoubleVerify) to block your ads from appearing on low-quality, made-for-advertising sites, ensuring budgets are spent on legitimate, relevant platforms that align with your brand values and target audience. This is probably the most effective way to counter these sites, but obviously costs money and will need to be calculated into the ROI of programmatic ads.

Alternatively, if you want to save money and don’t want to invest in a third party tool, you can also pull a list of ad placements on a weekly basis and cultivate a blacklist of sites that you aren’t seeing significant traffic or conversions from.

However, my tip would be to work from inclusion rather than exclusion. The people behind MFA sites are usually highly crafty and can create/hide their sites from blacklists pretty well. So build an expansive list of websites (you can even build your own crawler, or DM me and I’ll help you build one for free) that would start from your highest quality site and pull a list of connected domains that allow you to be more sure you are spending your budget effectively and in a contextually accurate way.