On April 24th, 2024, Pixalate held a live webinar on the Made-for-Advertising (MFA) landscape with Tyler Loechner, VP of Platform Growth and Research, Amit Shetty, VP of Product, and Melwin James Poovakottu, Director of Data Science. During the event, the three discussed Pixalate’s complimentary October 2023 and March 2024 MFA report findings, along with recent developments and takeaways related to the prevalence - and detection - of MFA websites.
“It’s clearly content built by publishers … which favors ad revenue or content quantity. … The key thing is that these are websites that hide in plain sight. So the websites look like they are low CPM, high viewability and very tempting to buy, but they really are not what they seem to be.
When you look at the details of what's happening on those sites [with the kind of traffic that is going on], it becomes evident that the quality of that traffic is questionable.”.” — Amit Shetty, Vice President of Product
During the webinar, the discussion kicked-off with background on Pixalate’s methodology for detecting MFA. They explained how the methodology involves analyzing traffic data rather than relying on crawlers. The conversation also covered various signals explored to identify MFA, such as high ad refresh rates, ad density, and traffic sources.
“[Pixalate] came up with four different signals [for detecting MFA] ... Number one is having a very high ad refresh rate. That's the number of ads delivered per minute per page ... Similarly, we have high ad density, which is the number of placements per minute on a page ... We also look at the sources of traffic. And lastly, [we look at] if the majority of the traffic is sourced from social media or paid traffic.” — Melwin James Poovakottu, Director of Data Science
Tyler, Amit, and Melwin discussed MFA ad spend distribution, viewability, and invalid traffic (IVT) rates. They stressed the importance of being data-driven in addressing the MFA challenge. They offered solutions, including Pixalate’s Media Ratings Terminal, such as its analytics platforms, data feeds to block MFA traffic, and trust indices for evaluating sellers and publishers.
Over 40 media experts attended the webinar, culminating with a live Q&A on the distinction between MFA and IVT, recent news stories about MFA, changes observed in MFA trends over time, and plans for future reports.
Download Pixalate’s complimentary MFA reports to explore recent MFA findings withinthe web and CTV landscapes:
To learn more about Pixalate’s MFA solutions and see the tools in action, schedule a demo today.
Click below to be directed to the recorded webinar:
MFA Webinar Speakers
