What is MFA or Made For Advertising?
"Made for Advertising" (MFA) is a term used to indicate websites or apps that are intentionally structured to maximize ad revenue for publishers. MFA websites offer a subpar user experience, bombarding visitors with distracting elements such as flashing ads and popups that obscure the content, resulting in a poor advertising-to-attention ratio.
What is the impact of MFA?
Pixalate'research shows that approximately 2% of websites fall into the MFA category, and impact roughly 11% of open programmatic web ad impressions (16% in North America).
In the past, many entities chose to ignore MFA sites as long as they offered high reach and viewability. That attitude has been changing as companies recognize the lack of effectiveness of advertising on these websites, and the bad experiences advertisers' brands would be associated with, making it a brand safety risk to work with MFA sites.
Is MFA different from IVT?
The general agreement in the industry is that not all MFA traffic can be considered IVT, given it may not meet the thresholds needed to be considered as IVT. That said, many of the data points that Pixalate uses for its MFA detection methodology are signals to its IVT detection algorithms.
In addition, we have seen MFA sites to have higher IVT levels in general than non-MFA sites (around 20% higher as of November 2023)
Is MFA only relevant to websites?
Most of the conversations in the industry have been around websites. Pixalate believes that this is incorrect because mobile and CTV apps can also have similar problems. Pixalate is able to deliver a multi-platform MFA identification solution, covering websites, mobile and CTV apps because our methodology analyzes data around traffic patterns, rather than depending on crawling websites.
More information
Products from Pixalate to combat MFA
If you have any further questions or feedback, please contact us via your Customer Success Manager, or by emailing us at support@pixalate.com