Click Fraud Blog
What is a Made For Adsense (MFA) site?
November 14th, 2007
UPDATE: Since this post was first published in October 2007, a statement from Click Forensics suggests that 60% of traffic from MFA sites is click fraud.
Over 60 percent of traffic from parked domains and made for ad sites was click fraud
Google’s Adsense has created an environment where on-line advertising is a commodity to web site owners. Even tiny blogs can advertise multinational corporation’s products without the need for an ad sales team, or embarrassing questions on how pitiful a sites audience is.
The Adsense programme allows website owners to syndicate adverts from the adwords programme and receive a share in the ad revenue when the ads are clicked upon. The more clicks the more income for the site owner.
In recent years an alarming rise has been seen in the made for Adsense or MFA sites. These sites have zero content, rather they are made up of Adsense ads pointing to other websites. The MFA site owner will create an adwords campaign bidding on a high value keywords, an example of this could be home mortgages. If they create a compelling enough Adwords ad, the Google user will click through to see pages of Adsense ads pointing to other legitimate home mortgage sites.
The MFA sites are often cunningly designed so the Google sponsored links look like valid content links, which the user will unintentionally click on, thus generating income for the site owner.
How do these sites have a profitable model? There is a flaw (in my opinion) in the Google algorithm for ad placement which involves max cost per click x click through rate, so if the MFA has a max CPC of 0.25 and the legitimate sites are bidding on 1.00, if the MFA sites has a high click through it will appear above the 1.00 bidder, and if the Google payout is in excess of 0.25, there is the profit.
Is this click fraud? No these site work within, but near to the edge of the Adsense rules. Should these clicks be marked as invalid? In my opinion yes, the low quality of the clicks caused by the deception of the end users tarnishes Google’s business model which is already stained by the high level of click fraud coming from the content network (the network where Adsense resides).
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Tags: made for adsense, MFA
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