The furor around Made For Advertising (MFA) sites and generative AI content has reignited the perennial brand safety debate. While there have been calls for advertising platforms to introduce controls against such properties, any control inevitably excludes legitimate supply that would be beneficial for advertisers to reach.
Should advertising platforms expand the reach of brand safety controls beyond advertiser concerns and directly shape what content is monetizable? Or should they focus on core brand safety priorities to prevent criminal activity and leave the rest for the market to decide?
Every Ad-Supported Website is ‘Made for advertising’
Anyone who was around for the heyday of newspaper publishing will remember pages filled with ads from top to bottom, which is still the case for many papers running at the moment. Translate such a paper to the internet today, and there’s a high chance it would be unfairly branded as an MFA.
To be clear, some sites fall under the umbrella of MFA and deserve the stigma. Sites that steal and then monetize copyrighted material should, of course, be barred. Beyond that, the definition of an MFA site becomes fuzzy. Filling a page with ad slots may not be the best practice, but it is not criminal, and there’s a case to be made that all websites that monetize primarily through advertising could count as “made for advertising.”
Often, the differentiating factor is simply resources. While more established publishers have the resources to reduce their reliance on advertising through subscription programs, first-party data monetization and deals with e-commerce platforms, smaller publishers tend to rely entirely on advertising. Such publishers rarely secure direct deals or land on curated marketplaces, monetizing almost entirely through open programmatic.
We can discuss the problems with ad stuffing—and my advice is always to take a quality over quantity approach to placements and formats—but for low-margin publishers at the mercy of the open programmatic market, filling the page with as many ads as possible may seem like the best bet. If readers engage with those ads, the publisher is entitled to their share of spend regardless of the quality of the site.
A legitimate but poorly resourced publisher could get their foot in the door with a steady stream of programmatic revenues, then, as they grow, refine their ad strategy to reduce the load on the page and pursue other avenues for monetization. However, if such a publisher was flagged as an MFA site and excluded from the marketplace, they would never have the opportunity.
Whether or not MFAs are an issue is for advertisers to decide. So far, there’s little evidence it’s a major concern for them, as long as brand safety controls and ad fraud prevention are in place. What we must not do is use blunt automated controls against MFAs to cut the feet out from under publishers that don’t meet an arbitrary quality bar.
Love or Hate AI Content, Engagement Should Be Monetizable
Then there’s the generative AI elephant in the room. There’s much fear at the moment that sites will churn out generated content to capture readers and monetize their attention with advertising at a rate no human-led publisher can keep up with. While the concerns for publishers competing with such sites are obvious, there’s only so much we can realistically expect advertisers to care.
As long as no ad fraud has occurred — where advertisers are charged for impressions or clicks that did not happen — it’s still an actual human who has encountered and engaged with the campaign. The ad placement’s surroundings may not be to everyone’s tastes, but the objective of the advertiser has been achieved regardless. If there have been no heinous breaches to brand safety, should an advertising platform deny advertisers the opportunity to reach more supply?
Advertisers who do want to reach a specific caliber of publication can choose curated marketplaces that offer just that or opt for direct deals with chosen publications. But in the open programmatic ecosystem, excluding brand-safe and fraud-free placements — even alongside AI-generated content — merely prevents advertisers from reaching audiences.
Ultimately, this is a matter for the market to resolve. If advertisers decide en masse to reject such placements, then we will see curated marketplaces that exclude AI-focused publishers take off. Otherwise, there’s little advertising platforms can and should do to prevent advertisers from buying the attention of audiences, wherever they reside.
X Demonstrates the Limits of Laissez-Faire Brand Safety
Advertising platforms need to be realistic about the strength of measures they should take to control supply, and they need to take the same attitude toward demand. Elon Musk may have lashed out at GARM and crushed them under his legal weight, alleging that they advised advertisers to abandon the platform, but the truth is advertisers were fleeing the platform regardless of whether or not they followed GARM’s brand suitability framework.
Since relaxing content moderation to the bare minimum, X no longer passes the most basic brand safety tests and is now host to misinformation, disinformation and actual criminal activity. This may align with Musk’s free speech absolutist vision for an anything-goes social network, but X can’t force advertisers—or even entire countries, in the case of Brazil — to support it.
In the end, brand safety is not a problem to be solved but a balance to be struck. Take too heavy-handed an approach to brand safety, and legitimate publishers and valid supply can get caught in the crossfire. If it is too light a touch, advertisers will leave it on their own accord. The role of advertising platforms is to be an intermediary between supply and demand with the necessary controls to exclude criminal activity. Everything else? That’s for the market to decide.
