What is an MFA site?
An MFA (made-for-advertising) site is a website built mainly to earn ad revenue rather than to serve readers. Typical signs are many ads per page, auto-refreshing slots, slideshow or clickbait content and traffic bought cheaply from other platforms. Impressions are often real but low-value, and the ANA found MFA took 15% of measured programmatic spend in 2023.
Made-for-advertising sites (MFA) sites run traffic arbitrage: they buy sourced traffic at a few cents per visit, then show enough ads to earn more. The ANA's 2023 programmatic transparency study found MFA accounted for 21% of impressions and 15% of spend in the campaigns it examined; its 2025 benchmark studies reported that share falling below 1% of spend for participating advertisers after buyers began excluding them.
MFA is usually not ad fraud in the legal sense, since real people may see the ads, but it delivers poor attention and results. Buyers use MFA classification lists from verification vendors, inclusion lists and supply path optimization to avoid it. The ANA and IAB Tech Lab have published definitions of MFA characteristics.