As the ad industry amplifies the need to eliminate made-for-advertising (MFA) sites, many marketers are left wondering what they can do to protect their ad spend from going to these sites that don’t deliver any valuable outcomes.
The proliferation of MFA sites has made transparency more vital than ever. By implementing strict vetting processes and demanding greater transparency from advertising partners, you can ensure you’re investing in premium, brand-safe environments without sacrificing the scale and efficiency of programmatic advertising.
Marketers’ role in eliminating MFA sites
While we encourage SSPs to completely remove MFA sites and traffic arbitragers from their exchanges, marketers have significant influence in the programmatic ecosystem and can drive change by carefully selecting where to allocate their budgets.
After all, avoiding programmatic advertising is not a viable solution given the tremendous efficiency and value it drives. Instead, you can leverage existing tools to avoid any risks, foster a safe and transparent market, and confidently invest in premium placements.
Here are actionable steps you can take to redirect your valuable ad spend to legitimate, premium publishers:
1. Vet publishers and supply sources
Let’s be clear—MFA sites are not genuine publishers. They’re traffic arbitragers exploiting the ad ecosystem for profit without contributing any real value to the media landscape. Your brand dollars are powerful. Work with your programmatic partners to ensure you engage only with legitimate publishers that are worthy of your ad spend and ensure you engage your audience within quality environments. Evaluate publishers based on their reputation, traffic sources, and content quality. Avoid sites with poor, ad-heavy consumer experiences or suspicious patterns such as sudden traffic spikes or high levels of paid traffic.
2. Leverage established transparency standards
The same tools the programmatic industry has long relied on to foster a clean and transparent ecosystem, like ads.txt, SupplyChain object, and sellers.json, will also help in the fight against MFA. These are public files designed to help you verify the legitimacy of publishers and ad inventory but serve distinct purposes and need to be analyzed correctly to be effective (more on that below).
We recommend referencing sellers.json and SupplyChain, which are maintained by SSPs and exchanges, to verify all sellers involved in each bid request at the root publisher level, rather than solely at the domain level. Combating MFA is an ongoing effort, as new MFA domains appear all the time. Verifying the root seller rather than individual domains will help you efficiently identify and remove sellers that support MFA.
3. Develop allow lists
As mentioned previously, prioritize working with trusted exchanges and SSPs that rigorously vet their supply quality before they allow it to transact. Alternatively, working with a curator or working with your DSP to develop an allow list based on your objectives will also give you more control over the inventory you purchase.
You can lean on sellers.json to flip your strategy from creating an ever-expanding block list of MFA domains to an allow list of quality publishers you wish to invest in. Today’s game of constant domain Whac-A-Mole is not working to eliminate MFA. Maintaining lists of trusted publishers who are worthy of your brand spend requires planning and intention, but it is effective and will ensure a better ad experience for your audience.
4. Re-evaluate KPIs
On the surface, MFA sites can appear to achieve campaign KPIs at a low cost. They’re structured to leverage high ad density in technically viewable placements to cause inadvertent clicks along with auto-playing videos that drive high video completion rates. And, unlike invalid and fraudulent traffic, MFA sites are reaching actual individuals. However, these sites fail to provide genuine consumer engagement or value.
Scrutinize your campaign goals. Are you truly hitting your performance goals, or are they buoyed by cheap, ineffective MFA inventory mixed in alongside your quality placements and direct deals? Are you setting the right KPIs? Be sure to prioritize business outcomes rather than focusing too much on hitting metrics that may be superficial or misleading.
5. Collaborate to uphold a transparent ecosystem
Finally, we encourage you to join the conversation and collaborate with others across the industry. We need more concerted action and follow through if we want to fully eliminate MFA and maintain the integrity of the programmatic ecosystem. Review updates and recommendations from industry associations like the 4A’s, ANA, ISBA, WFA, and many others, share your learnings, and commit to adopting and adhering to programmatic standards. By collaborating, we can foster a more responsible and transparent ecosystem.
By implementing these measures, you can help diminish the prevalence of MFA sites, safeguard your investments, and ensure the delivery of high-quality ads via programmatic.
A deeper dive: safeguard your campaigns through supply chain transparency
Standardized by IAB Tech Lab, sellers.json, SupplyChain object, and Authorized Digital Sellers (ads.txt) are key tools that you can leverage to safeguard your programmatic campaigns from harmful sites. These tools provide vital information about the sellers of a publisher’s ad inventory yet have distinct purposes.
- Ads.txt and app-ads.txt are publicly accessible files allowing publishers to declare which sellers are authorized to sell their digital ad inventory. By listing authorized seller IDs, ads.txt helps you avoid fraudulent inventory and ensures that you’re buying from approved sources.
- Sellers.json is a list maintained by an SSP or exchange to provide transparency about all the entities allowed to sell digital ad inventory on their respective platforms. It lists each seller’s name, domain, and role (publisher or intermediary), allowing you to verify the legitimacy of the seller or reseller and understand their position in the advertising supply chain. This is also publicly accessible to reference (you can view the Index Exchange sellers.json at IndexExchange.com/sellers.json).
- SupplyChain details the complete transaction path for each bid request, from the original publisher to the final buyer. By including all entities involved in the selling or reselling process, this specification ensures that buyers can verify the legitimacy of each participant in the transaction chain.
Ads.txt allows publishers to declare sellers that are authorized to sell their ad inventory. However, it doesn’t disclose the full supply path for each available ad opportunity, including any authorized intermediaries and resellers participating in the sale. SupplyChain and sellers.json go a step further, enabling SSPs and exchanges to declare all parties involved in selling a publisher’s ad inventory.
This distinction is important when it comes to identifying and removing MFA from media buys as MFA is a moving target. If one domain is shut down today, another may pop up tomorrow. Or a domain may first appear as a legitimate publisher and pass quality audits, but later evolve into an MFA site that an SSP will remove from its exchange.
Industry exclusion lists or reports of newly discovered MFA sites aim to keep pace, but relying on ads.txt alone is inefficient and could result in outdated information. Cross-referencing ads.txt, sellers.json, and SupplyChain provides the full picture that will help you validate each step in the supply chain and ensure every seller is authorized.
Because different parties maintain these files, checking them all will help you identify any discrepancies—for instance, an MFA site could still list one of its SSP partners in its ads.txt file, but that SSP may have terminated it from its exchange and removed it from its sellers.json file. Sellers.json also cites publishers at the root publisher level. Using this information is helpful in developing an allow list, which will be a more efficient way to ensure quality ad placements compared to trying to keep up with blocking ever-changing domains.
Our commitment to quality publishers
As the programmatic landscape evolves, the responsibility grows for ad tech platforms, media owners, and buyers to foster a transparent, efficient, and quality advertising ecosystem. The future of the open web depends on it. By taking proactive steps to avoid MFA sites, you can benefit from the efficiency and scale programmatic provides, while ensuring that every dollar spent goes to legitimate publishers that will help you reach your audience.
At Index Exchange, we’re committed to maintaining trust, integrity, and efficiency in the programmatic supply chain, which is why we prohibit MFA sites on our exchange. Our rigorous audit processes ensure that every publisher meets the highest standards of integrity, and we take a proactive approach to continually audit our exchange and terminate MFA when we find it.
Learn more about our approach to exchange quality at Index Exchange and how we can help you achieve your advertising goals.
