The Rising Tide of MFAs
A $23 billion a year blunder and how sites filled with bad content and annoying ads will, ironically, drive better content.
The true power of programmatic advertising is often buried behind a chaotic mess of players in the middle who benefit from ambiguity. The industry has built itself on disingenuous statistics, dodgy websites, and the idea that a 0.2% click through rate is successful.
A recent investigation into the programmatic supply chain revealed that Made for Advertising (MFA) websites make up 21% of all impressions, and 15% of the overall advertising expenditure. This detailed report, released in June by the Association of National Advertisers, further disclosed that MFA website comprised 19% of open marketplace media purchases and 14% of private marketplace transactions. That is a considerable amount of waste — an estimated $23 billion lost to fraud annually.
MFA websites are the noisy, unruly websites that are over inundated with ads and are often combined with poor, clickbait driven content. Think of the ads that won’t stop bothering you. Now picture the entire site filled with those ads. They are created for the purpose of ad arbitrage and drive an incredible sum of wasted ad dollars to bad actors. Digiday, as usual, has a wonderful piece on this that summarizes the intricacies.
The average programmatic advertising campaign runs on an astonishing 44,000 websites and apps. Most people can’t name 100 websites, let alone 44,000. That’s where the crux of the matter lies: programmatic has gotten itself a bad name by allowing irrelevant content to own the space.
If content is king, then the reign of that king is marred by Rasputins. MFA websites will, given recent advancements in artificial intelligence, increase in number, with experts estimating 90% of content being AI generated as early as 2025. The ease of content generation will drastically expand the amount of content available online. In this massive sea of swelling irrelevant, inaccurate, or duplicated content, the calm waters of quality will reign supreme.
Quality of content, therefore, will be necessary for success within the programmatic ad space. This is great news for publishers with strong content, as they are at a premium. Publishers focused on delivering appealing, unique content will find their second wind as advertising dollars swing towards efficiency, and higher quality ad placements.
