What is Made-for-Advertising (MFA)?

Made-for-Advertising (MFA) refers to websites that are created primarily to generate advertising revenue rather than to provide valuable content or genuine user engagement. These sites typically have the following characteristics:

• Low-quality or thin content that may be AI-generated, plagiarized, or minimally edited
• Excessive ad placements that dominate the user interface
• Design patterns that maximize ad views (like slideshows that require multiple clicks)
• Content specifically created to attract search traffic but provide little value
• High ad-to-content ratios compared to legitimate publishers

MFA sites are problematic for the digital advertising ecosystem because they:

1. Drain advertising budgets by attracting impressions that have little genuine audience engagement
2. Create poor user experiences that can damage brand perception
3. Dilute the effectiveness of programmatic advertising
4. Often employ deceptive tactics to appear more legitimate than they are

As mentioned in the translated article, MFA websites accounted for approximately 13% of programmatic advertising expenditure in Q2 2024, representing a significant portion of potentially wasted ad spend. The rise of generative AI has made creating these sites even easier, as content can be mass-produced at scale.

Advertisers and agencies increasingly use brand safety and quality measurement tools to identify and avoid these sites in their media buys.