Imagine yourself searching for reviews on the latest smartphone before making a purchase. You type "best smartphone reviews 2024" into your search engine and click on one of the top results, expecting a detailed, informative article. Instead, you land on a website that looks promising at first glance, but as you begin to scroll, you notice something is off. The page is cluttered with advertisements—banner ads at the top, sidebar ads, pop-up ads, and even auto-playing video ads that obscure the content you are trying to read. The text of the article itself is sparse and lacks depth, often interrupted by more ads and poorly placed affiliate links.

Sounds familiar? This scenario basically exemplifies the typical user experience on a Made for Advertising (MFA) site.

Made for What?

These sites are designed to maximise ad impressions and clicks rather than provide meaningful content. Most recently, Forbes found itself amidst this MFA spiral, when ad quality firm Adalytics alleged that Forbes systematically misled advertisers into believing they were buying media on Forbes.com when they were actually buying media on a secret ‘made for advertising’ (MFA) subdomain, www3.forbes.com.

Some refer to MFA sites as a rabbit hole, where the deeper one delves, the more widespread it appears to be. The Association of National Advertisers or ANA’s programmatic media supply chain transparency report mentions that these sites are basically designed to fool digital ad buyers. It explained that MFA websites exhibit high measurability rates, good viewability rates, and low levels of invalid traffic, and usually have brand-safe environments. They also perform higher on video completion rates, often with autoplay ads that have the sound off. Notably, media CPMs paid on MFA websites are 25 percent lower than those paid on non-MFA websites.

All of these thus make MFA websites attractive to DSP bidding algorithms. However, these sites fail to perform on key metrics like brand lift and also take away a lot from user experience (as you pictured in the beginning of this story), thus being less likely to lead to final conversions or sales. In fact, according to Jounce Media, ads on MFA websites are at least 50 percent less likely to be attributed with driving a sale than the internet average.

ANA report also says that nearly a quarter of every dollar spent on programmatic advertising is going toward “suspect inventory.” Nearly 23% of the $88 billion spent on programmatic advertising is wasted, accounting for about $20 billion in lost ad spend, largely on “made for advertising” websites that typically draw readers in with clickbait.

Not so legit

These sites are not just fooling ad buyers and users, but also are taking away a lot from legitimate websites or publishers.

Legitimate websites, a useful blend of content and ads, offer value for money to advertisers by attracting real audiences and driving real user engagement. A high-quality website is a powerhouse for online advertising. Mitesh Kothari, Co-founder and Chief Creative Officer, White Rivers Media pointed out that however, adtech organisations that specialise in programmatic ads stand to profit from MFA. “Advertisers prefer these websites to manage their ad campaigns effectively. Hence, they actively seek out MFA sites perfectly aligned with their campaign objectives, raising ad spends several times higher than legitimate websites,” he said.

Another way in which these sites are impacting legitimate websites is by affecting the search. According to Sajal Gupta, Chief Executive, Kiaos Marketing, MFA websites drive search traffic away from legitimate websites. “While the category building and curiosity on brands are done by

the legitimate business, the outcome in most cases is in the form of the enhanced search volumes. The benefits of this search volume are then driven away by the MFA websites, thereby affecting the legitimate websites negatively,” he said.

Gupta further explained that the MFA websites use black hat techniques to rank above legitimate websites, which contribute towards driving away valuable search traffic. “When users land on MFA sites expecting valuable content and instead find excessive ads and low-quality content, they can become frustrated. This can lead to a general distrust of search results, negatively impacting legitimate sites that rely on organic search traffic.”

Additionally, there is also an effect on ad network rates, according to digital experts. Gupta said that proliferation of MFA sites has the capacity to dilute the quality of the ad network inventory resulting in reducing the overall value of ads. In such a scenario, legitimate websites may find it harder to compete for ad revenue because advertisers might pay less for placements due to the abundance of low-quality ad inventory.

For Preetham Venkky, Chief Digital Officer, DDB Mudra Group, it comes down to the dynamics of the power law, wherein, a small number of items in a distribution can have a disproportionate impact on the overall data set. "The high-tail legitimate sites, let's go with the top one million, are earning half the (ad) revenue. The remaining 100 million sites, primarily built as MFAs, the long-tail, which optimise SEOs and other organic searches to mimic that effect, obviously earn the remainder; and if they weren't there, logic presupposes that revenue would shift to the legit sites."

But, as Venkky points out, everything on the internet, and the network, ultimately follows the power law; there is no beating it, especially within an open market system. "You need both: the high-tail and the long-tail. You can't survive if you don't have both. I would say there's nothing that can be done about it."

Eventually, it turns out that the way out for advertisers here could be to prioritise value over cost, and not the other way around. Experts suggest that a major reason for the apparent lack of transparency in the programmatic ecosystem is that incentives driving advertiser behaviour are often misaligned with the goals of their marketing campaigns. When advertisers prioritise cost over value, they do so to their own detriment.

ANA’s report puts it in a simpler way and says, “Chasing cheap CPMs will likely lead to a cascade of downstream ad quality issues that might not be initially detectable.  Common sense should tell buyers that not all ‘cheap’ inventory is ‘quality’ inventory.”