Advertisers tried to clean up clickbait in 2023. Jury’s out on whether it’s working

AI was, without a doubt, the buzzword of the advertising and tech world this year.

Another word wasn’t too far behind: the metaverse. Just kidding. We’re talking about clickbait, or so-called made-for-advertising (MFA) websites, which largely exist to soak up advertising dollars.

After an industry report this year found that advertisers spent billions on such websites, ad-tech vendors have spent the last few months trying to clean up their acts. Is it having an impact? Not yet, at least according to Rocky Moss, an ad fraud researcher and a co-founder and CEO of DeepSee, which investigates publisher quality and web traffic with the help of web crawlers that trawl the deep sea (get it?) of the internet.

“I haven’t seen meaningful differences in the results of audits that I usually run,” he told Marketing Brew. “But it’s been a very short time that these policies have been in place. Maybe it’s too soon to say.”

Rewind: MFA inventory has been an issue for a long time. Marketing Brew was writing about this in 2021, and CNBC once made a fake website that plagiarized content and was able to find advertisers, suggesting a lack of quality controls for advertisers and ad-tech partners.

This year, the Association of National Advertisers published a two-part report that found that about 15% of programmatic, open-web advertising dollars went to MFA websites, totaling about $10 billion in ad spend.

• After the first part of the report was released in June, ad-tech vendors like Pubmatic, Magnite, and OpenX said they’d no longer include MFA inventory in the curated publisher lists they sell to select advertisers. (Advertisers buying on the open web will still have to sift through MFA inventory.)
• Both DoubleVerify and Integral AdScience, two of the largest verification and brand safety companies, recently announced separate detection tools they say will help keep advertisers from MFA inventory.
• Demand-side platforms, which often represent advertisers, have been largely silent.

The industry has stopped short of developing a formal standard around MFA content, and it’s more of a vibe than a hard definition. (DeepSee has its own criteria for what to look for, like whether a site has reputable backlinks, has an organic social following, or whether a site is unranked.)

Moss and DeepSee helped establish guidelines for avoiding MFA inventory, and contributed to the ANA’s supply-chain report, which suggested that advertisers rely on publisher whitelists. But the largest tech companies are investing heavily in automation, taking the controls from advertisers in exchange for efficiency. Google was recently the subject of a report from ad-tech research firm Adalytics, which claimed that the platform’s third-party extension tools ran ads on sites that didn’t meet Google’s own standards.

There is a connection between automation—buyers taking less control over where their dollars go—and quality, he said.

“Any totally self-serve publisher network is going to just be crap,” Moss said. “Without a proportionate level of oversight, it’s just going to get overrun with bad actors.”

Despite some updated policies and a general public agreement that MFA content isn’t useful, Moss is still worried about the “long-term health of an ad-monetized web,” he told us.

Advertisers will “optimize for whatever outcome generates the most capital in the short term, and that doesn’t necessarily account for the human cost or the cost in terms of the usefulness of the internet. Search is already a lot worse,” he said.

“The ad industry loves to shoegaze and say, ‘Oh, we fund the internet,’” he said, but it should “not encourage…vapid, meaningless, generation of content for the sole purpose of extracting as much as possible in the short term.”