The web is riddled with so-called “made for advertising” (MFA) sites, but one corner at least seems to be free of the click-bait-driven ad-stacking inventory, according to an audit by digital supply chain consultancy Jounce.

Yahoo Backstage, a relatively new supply source platform, scored 100% free of MFA inventory in an audit, according to Jounce Media, which has recognized it as the “largest MFA-free supply source on the open web.” Backstage, besides selling Yahoo-owned properties such as Yahoo Sports and Yahoo Finance, also features more than 100 other publishers through the Yahoo demand side platform. But none of those had MFA inventory, said Jounce Founder Chris Kane in an interview.

Yahoo bills Backstage as a supply source exclusively accessed through Yahoo’s DSP. The Jounce audit did not certify that all inventory moving through Yahoo's DSP is MFA-free, just that accessing Backstage.

The audit comes amid growing concern about MFA sites following an Association of National Advertisers report on programmatic ad buying in June that found 15% of dollars and 21% of impressions for study participants went to low-quality MFA sites.

MFA becomes a dirty word

In the wake of that report, players in media and ad tech have scrambled to distance themselves from MFA sites. That includes WPP’s GroupM, which announced last month it was working with Jounce to provide new protections against buyers getting MFA inventory when they really don’t want it. The uproar even led Terence Kawaja, CEO of Luma Partners, to jokingly post on X that his investment bank would no longer represent MFA sites, even though it never did, and created a parody video about them.

But it’s really no laughing matter to marketers, who increasingly have been increasingly focused on trying to dodge the sites over the past year, Kane said. The ANA report “definitely added fuel to the fire, because if anyone wasn’t thinking of it as top of mind, it certainly seems to be a higher topic of discussion today.”

Yahoo Backstage isn’t the only supply source that Jounce has found to be MFA-free, but the other two are relatively small, Kane said.

Jounce’s client base includes Procter & Gamble Co., according to people familiar with the matter, and Bayer, according to the firm’s website, and visibility based on client work is important in assessing the quality of inventory across the market.

“We work with lots of companies,” Kane said. “We currently monitor $50 million per month of DSP spend across a reasonably diverse group of buyers who buy through all the major DSPs. And I think the rock-solid statement is that there are no [other large] SSPs today that do not sell made for advertising inventory.”

Definitions are tricky

One problem, however, is a firm definition of a made-for-advertising site.

“We have a kind of gray area,” Kane said. “When in doubt, we don’t call a publisher MFA.”

To define a site as MFA, Jounce determines whether it fits at least one of three criteria. One is a site that has twice the dependence on paid traffic as the average website Jounce tracks; second, is a site that has double the ad load of the average website; and third is if the site has 50% or lower conversion rates than the average website in terms of driving sales or other conversion indicators.

“Ideally we would prove all three of those things,” Kane said. “But we would only add a site to the list if we have data to prove at least one of them.”

The definitions help show why MFA sites can be hard to avoid, because that data can be fluid. Also, it’s almost impossible to avoid MFA sites using exclusion lists, because many of them change their names frequently, Kane said. And even inclusion lists can be tricky.

“A lot of buyers don’t use” inclusion lists, he said, because they’re nervous about losing scale of impressions they buy.

“Also I’ve literally never reviewed an inclusion list that doesn’t include some made for advertising,” Kane said. “It’s hard to spot some of this stuff because they have very innocuous-sounding names.”

Workarounds and tradeoffs

Performance marketers such as e-commerce players or insurance companies don’t run into MFA issues, because the conversions they can measure on their websites automatically steer them away from low-performing MFA sites, Kane said. Advertisers that have little or no direct sales and rely on reach and impressions to drive their programmatic buys, such as packaged-goods companies, are the ones vulnerable to MFA sites that suck in spending through illusory delivery of what Kane called “vanity metrics.”

Doing the work to eliminate MFAs does cost money, and it likely can result in higher cost per thousand (CPMs) in digital buys, Kane said.

“CPMs are likely to go up and viewability somewhat counterintuitively go down when you turn off made for advertising sites,” he said. “But you’ll sell more products, because you’re running ads now on ‘real’ websites that have high-quality ad products that actually influence consumer purchase decisions.”

Now that Yahoo Backstage, which launched less than a month ago, has some third-party evidence that it’s keeping budgets away from MFA sites, the next step it proving that it’s worth the effort to do so based on performance data, said Adam Roodman, senior VP of product strategy.

“We’re accumulating data around that,” Roodman said. “We’ll be sharing it with customers of our DSP and then with the industry, and we’re pretty bullish on where it’s going to lead us.”

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CLARIFICATION: An earlier version of the story identified Yahoo Backstage as a supply-side platform. Yahoo describes it as a direct path from the Yahoo demand-side platform to Yahoo and affiliated publisher digital inventory.