More than 1 in 10 website ad dollars goes to made-for-advertising sites

Key stat: 11% of worldwide website ad spend went to made-for-advertising (MFA) sites in Q3 2024, according to Pixalate.

Beyond the chart:

• The share of worldwide website ad spend going to MFA sites remained the same from Q3 2023 to Q3 2024.
• Generative AI (genAI) has contributed to a glut of low-quality content online, but Google has also gotten better at downgrading spam websites that use genAI.

Use this chart: Advertisers can use this chart to push audits for programmatic spend to ensure ad dollars are directed toward high-quality, high-engagement publishers rather than MFA sites. They can also make the case for advertising on premium channels where MFA placements are less likely.

Note: Pixalate bases made-for-advertising (MFA) designations on a number of observable characteristics, including ad refresh rate, ad density, social traffic rate, and paid traffic rate. Pixalate analyzes these traffic signals and flags sites as likely MFA when any of the factors fall outside the baselines calculated by analyzing quantiles for all ad impressions per website.

Methodology: Data is from the December 2024 Pixalate "Made-for-Advertising Websites Benchmark Report: Q3 2024." Over 20 billion open programmatic ad impressions worldwide were analyzed by Pixalate's data science team during Q3 2024 on ad spend trends on made-for-advertising (MFA) websites. MFA sites often include intrusive advertising techniques that can result in poor advertising-to-attention ratio.