Made for Advertising/Arbitrage Sites
Publisher Quality Utility
Challenges for Legitimate Publishers
Brands prefer to promote themselves in environments that enhance their reputation. The highest quality environments are typically scarce and relatively expensive. Below these highest quality outlets, there is a continuum where quality and price tend to be correlated. The current environment causes two problems for publishers:
- There is no agreed upon definition of a quality inventory partner.
- While there is a quality/price continuum, there are many instances where publishers are excluded from buys (i.e., put on a brand or agency’s exclusion list) based on one or more characteristics of their site.
Recent industry discussion of Made-for-Arbitrage (MFA) sites highlights the situation and presents the opportunity for buyers and sellers to come together and better understand what characteristic or combination of characteristics lead inventory to be considered “premium”, a commodity, or sufficiently poor to be included on an exclusion list.
Defining a Solution
Every good solution starts with a shared understanding of the problem.
To further the discussion around “Made for Advertising”/Arbitrage” sites, the ANA, the 4A’s, the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA) have released a detailed definition of so-called “Made for Advertising” websites that the ANA says comprises 21 percent of impressions and 15 percent of ad spend.
BSI spoke with industry leaders about this issue. You can get their insights by watching the video.
To provide a hub for further industry discussion of inventory quality and a place where publishers can go to maximize the chances that they are complying with buy-side preferences BSI and its members and partners have built the Publisher Quality Utility.
Read More
- What is the Publisher Quality Utility?
- Publishers No Longer Need To Wonder If They’re On MFA Blocklists (AdExchanger)
- Brand Safety Institute Launches MFA Transparency Utility for Publishers (BSI press release)
- A brand safety watchdog wants to galvanize ad tech vendors to save publishers from MFA classification (Digiday)
- WTF are made-for-advertising sites (MFAs) (Digiday)
- A guide to identifying Made for Advertising websites (IAB UK)