In the complex media ecosystem, advertisers have many choices, and they often are unaware that their ads are appearing on low-quality Made for Advertising (MFA) websites. The Ad Fontes Media analyst team has identified many MFA sites that compete with high-reliability news sites for ad dollars.

“We rate the news for reliability and bias, and MFAs are very closely tied to the mission of what we do, rating the news every day,” said Ad Fontes Media CEO and founder Vanessa Otero during a webinar with advertising and media literacy professionals. “MFAs are an important part of our news ecosystem, so we started exploring these more and more and more.” 

Using content analysis and background research, Ad Fontes Media analysts have identified hundreds of MFA sites. Otero said it’s important that advertisers and brands understand the differences between these websites and those providing high-quality journalism.

“When we got involved in the media industry, we thought our data could help advertisers avoid extremely polarizing content and misleading and inaccurate content,” Otero said. “But the more large brands we talked to, the more [they] told us, ‘That’s not really a problem for us because we just don’t advertise in [the] news any more. We don’t want to be associated with anything upsetting or unpleasant’.” This has had real-world consequences on newsrooms, as evident by the decrease in overall news advertising, according to a report from Pew Research Center. 

In many cases, advertisers use programmatic advertising to filter out any topics that they think could be problematic, such as stories about war, Israel and many other important and breaking news topics. Instead, advertisements appear on MFA websites, which feature more generic and non-news content.

In other words, ad revenue is benefitting low-quality and cheap-to-produce MFA sites instead of supporting high-quality media sources, which use trained journalists and high-effort reporting to share the important news of the day. 

In fact, an Association of National Advertisers Transparency Study found that $88 billion a year is being spent in the programmatic advertising marketplace. A closer look at campaigns from 21 major advertisers found that 21% of impressions came from MFAs.

“Our point of view is that more information helps in a marketplace of ideas,” Otero said. “We think that one of the most damaging things that these sorts of sites do is monetize lower-reliability sites and compete with high-reliability publishers for ad dollars.”

Otero said advertisers often don’t know which sites their ad dollars are supporting. Identifying these low-quality MFAs is instrumental in helping advertisers avoid them and instead support high-quality journalism.

So, how does Ad Fontes Media identify MFA websites? We consider several factors:

•     Authorship: Fictitious bylines, no bylines, etc.
•     About Section: No About section or inaccurate information, etc.
•     Site Creation Intent: Focus is on generic content for a particular demographic, etc.
•     Topic Selection: No current events or politics, etc.
•     Timeliness: Evergreen or old content, etc.
•     Content Generation: Low-effort reporting, AI, etc.
•     Linking and Referral Practices: Infinite scroll, clickbait headlines, etc.
•     Ad-serving practices: Multiple ads everywhere on the page, quick ad refresh, etc.

Learn more about Ad Fontes’ classification of MFAs and see several examples of MFA websites by viewing a recording of the Nov. 30 webinar. Want more information on Ad Fontes’ MFA data platform? Contact our sales team!

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