Jounce MFA Evaluation Criteria

Jounce Media’s framework for identifying Made For Advertising inventory

We define the Made For Advertising (MFA) category as “inventory that achieves superficial KPIs like viewability by creating a user-hostile advertising experience.” You can find more information here:

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Because a “user-hostile advertising experience” is a subjective criteria, it is not obvious where we draw the line on which inventory meets the MFA standard. This post is intended to describe the signals we consider and the process we follow to make these pass/fail determinations.

We perform a daily battery of tests across every RTB-traded website to evaluate three hallmarks of MFA supply:

1. Paid Traffic

   Made For Advertising publishers have little-to-no organic audience and are instead highly dependent on visits sourced from clickbait ads that run on social networks and content recommendations platforms. Buying paid traffic is the primary cost driver of operating an MFA business.

2. Aggressive Monetization

   Overcoming paid traffic acquisition costs requires MFA publishers to engage in aggressive monetization practices. Through a combination of high ad load and rapid auto-refreshing placements, these publishers capture an arbitrage opportunity, but they also create a user-hostile advertising experience.

3. Superficial KPIs

   That user-hostile experience entirely eliminates the effectiveness of advertising. Made For Advertising publishers can manufacture ad products that achieve attractive vanity metrics like high viewability and high video completion rates. But our research demonstrates MFA inventory has no impact on consumer purchase decisions.

Consistent with this framework, every website on Jounce Media’s MFA list meets at least one (and often all three) of the following criteria:

1. Paid traffic: the percentage of traffic that is the result of paid advertising is at least 2x the internet average

2. Aggressive monetization: Ad density is at least 2x the internet average

3. Superficial KPIs: Ads are at least 50% less likely to be attributed with driving a sale than the internet average

Notably, some publishers engage in monetization techniques that create an MFA experience on some, but not all, pageviews. Our daily export of MFA domains specifies the percentage of bid requests that Jounce classifies as MFA, and we recommend buyers exclude all domains for which at least 25% of bid requests lead to an MFA experience.

To protect against the risk that MFA publishers may use this document to evade detection, we are deliberately non-specific about both our analytical methods and current thresholds for MFA classification. But on a case-by-case basis, we will provide additional detail about specific domains where our customers disagree with our MFA classifications. To request supporting evidence of any classification, please send an email to contact@jouncemedia.com.