What Is An MFA Site?

Date First Published: 9th August 2023

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: Web Advertising

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty Level: 5/10

Learn about what an MFA site is in this article.

Stands for a made for ads site, made for advertising site, or made for AdSense site. An MFA site is a type of website solely created to display ads to earn advertising revenue. MFA sites often use aggressive tactics and clickbait titles to drive traffic to pages with ads, and put little to no effort into the actual content and the user experience.

MFA sites are a violation of the AdSense Programme Policies, since they state that pages cannot be solely created to display ads. Although the programme policies have got stricter over the years and Google has been suspending accounts that use AdSense on sites solely created for ads, MFA sites are still around now. A study from the ANA (Association of National Advertisers), found that 21% of impressions served were on MFA sites.

Signs Of An MFA Site

Simply having a website with ads does not make it an MFA site. Nearly all websites have some ads to earn advertising revenue. However, the ads on MFA sites are excessive and disruptive to the overall user experience. Below are 12 signs of an MFA site:

• There are more ads than content on the page. Ideally, there should be much fewer ads than content. If the ads seem to dominate the pages, that is a sign of an MFA site.
• The site displays ads that require you to take a survey to get a chance of winning a free product or good before continuing.
• The ads automatically redirect you to another page without any user interaction.
• The site has continuous popup ads that take up the whole page and reappear after closing them.
• The popup ads have no closing button.
• The site displays ads that ask you to enable browser notifications and only display the content of the page or download a file if you enable them.
• The site uses aggressive tactics to force users to disable their adblockers. The site may run anti-adblocking scripts that have functionality that can detect whether any ads were loaded or detect well-known adblockers. After detection, they may freeze the page and display an overlay that completely covers the content, or restricts access to certain features until the user disables their adblocker. This is highly controversial and widely considered bad practice.
• The ads cannot be differentiated from the main content or are misleading. Some sites may disguise their ads as legitimate buttons or images so that users cannot tell them apart from the content to trick users into clicking on them and making money from all of the clicks.
• The site asks people to click on the ads using phrases like 'click the ads' or 'support us'.
• The site uses pagination navigation on very short articles. This means that readers have to click through several pages to continue reading the article. This is done to increase ad impressions and clicks.
• Lots of duplicate, rewritten, scraped, auto-generated, or spun content.
• Lots of false or misleading information or fake news.

Effects Of MFA Sites On Advertisers

Most advertisers do not want to spend money on ads for MFA sites that don't provide a good user experience or have low-quality content. This is because they often generate large numbers of invalid clicks and impressions from people that have no interest in their products or services, which are not valuable to them. Fortunately, most advertising networks allow advertisers to choose which sites to display their ads on and exclude their ads from displaying on specific websites, like MFA sites. Overall, MFA sites are harmful to the online advertising industry.

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