# S1 E1 MFA

S1 E1 MFA 

[00:00:00] Hello, my name's Tom and we are the middlemen. Um, we've worked together. I'm Tom. This is Todd. And we were, we've worked together in media and e-commerce. We've had great conversations together as we've worked and sometimes we've had debates with each other. Sometimes it's gotten heated. Um, but we wanted to share those conversations with you because our friends in ad tech, retail media, and the Shopify ecosystem. 

[00:00:26] They probably all are reading these articles that we we're gonna talk about, um, all the time, and they might know 70%, they might know 40%. But really, until you really dig into some of these things, you really, you know, you can miss some, some really important parts of what's going on in the Ad tech and, and MarTech industries. 

[00:00:45] So I wanted to thank you for joining us on our first episode. Today's topic. Todd, what are we gonna talk about? So the topic that's really come up recently, or one of them is controversies around what the industry calls that uses the term [00:01:00] MFA, which historically is meant made for advertising. And this actually goes back about a month. 

[00:01:06] A vendor, uh, found Forbes running, quote unquote an MFA. Site on a subdomain or a section of their site and not the standard dub dub dub. It was like dub dub dub three.forbes.com, and there's controversy around was Forbes identifying that this subdomain was a different user experience than the rest of their site as they were selling their ads programmatically through ad exchanges and, and things like that. 

[00:01:43] And so they were called out for, are they doing the right thing? Are they being above board? Are they being transparent? Are they, 'cause there's a lot of people who look at. At MFAs, and this has been a controversy going back a long time, and some people you could think of MFAs like clickbaity sites, like [00:02:00] slideshows. 

[00:02:01] A lot of the, there's tons of ads in Facebook and, and other platforms where it's like the top 10 crazy celebrity things that happen today and you click through and you go to a slide show. I guilty of clicking through on some of those, right? Lots of people have, it's like the tabloid aisle of the supermarket, so to speak, and. 

[00:02:20] So those sites have been around a long time. You know, some people call them meme sites, some people call them publishers. But there really this idea of what they're, um, fundamentally they're sites that buy traffic. They don't get organic traffic, and they're buying from, again, places like Facebook and other ad platforms to drive traffic back. 

[00:02:36] So what they're doing is they're arbitraging the cost of that traffic against the ad revenue they can generate on the other side. And so that's been a somewhat controversial business and practice for a long time. In the ad industry. Um, and so people have, and it seems to come up every three, six months, like the latest, like, oh, or should we as an industry be supporting [00:03:00] these types of sites? 

[00:03:01] And so a month ago, Forbes was pulled out for saying, Hey, wait a second. Forbes is running an MFA site within their domain, and it doesn't look like they're being transparent about. The fact that they're not sending traffic to their normal domain. So if you're an ad buyer, you think you're buying the normal Forbes article. 

[00:03:20] Well, if you bought this subdomain, it wasn't the same user experience. The ad load was many, many, many times higher. Yeah. And that's sort of, you know, when I read about this, uh, a little while ago, my first, you know, reaction, you know, was from an ad quality perspective, oh my god, you know, this would be an insane user experience with all these ads all over the place. 

[00:03:41] Um, and so, you know, initially I was like, okay, this is fraud. This is what I know of as MFA, you know. Um, but I think you know, what you talked about in terms of buying traffic, um, there's two parts to it. There's the ad load, there's the buying traffic. And if you don't [00:04:00] separate those things, I think you kind of just sort of looked at anything and you just say, oh, it's MFA, we need to block it. 

[00:04:04] Right. Well, I think your, your, your reaction. And, and you know, and, and for those listening, Tom has been in retail and online advertising related the intersections for that for a very long time. So you're very knowledgeable about the space and your gut reaction is when you see the three letters MFA is fraud. 

[00:04:23] Yeah. And it's wrong. Like it's somehow maybe even illegal. Right. And so, whereas, you know, we started talking about this and why we sort of, it became a topic to kinda share with the world is I was like, it's not fraud. Yeah, I, these sites are, can be perfectly legitimate. And Tom's reaction was like, what are you talking about, Todd? 

[00:04:41] And uh, and you know, how can you defend these? And I said, you know what? The re there, there's degrees of behavior here that I think we need to focus in on because I think the reality is with MFAs, you know, people when they bring that term is like say, well, let's define an MFA. And the reality is it's kind of like porn. 

[00:04:58] You know it when you see it. When you actually [00:05:00] start looking for definitions, you're like, well it's a publisher with a lot of ads. And as I said to Tom in our original conversation, which, which led to this today, I said, tell me a local news broadcaster website you've been to recently where you just aren't bombarded with popups and Right layovers and all sorts of an ad load that is probably even worse than most MFA sites. 

[00:05:18] Like I just dread going to a local news site because you're just gonna get just murdered with ads. Right. Like, well, how is that any different? Yeah. And it's, it's systemic problem where they're not making enough revenue. On their, you know, their, their very premium domain or even, you know, medium premium domain, um, without making enough money, they start just keep loading it up with ads. 

[00:05:42] Is that, is that a made for advertising site? Well, we probably say no, it isn't. Right. Even though the ad verification companies are now starting to use that as a way of, you know, creating shades of gray, of like MFA, lightly MFA, whatever, a little bit, right? And, and I think, you know, even them calling aside MFA is potentially [00:06:00] problematic in, in, you know, what they should say is, let's get to more specific definitions. 

[00:06:04] And to your point about pro, you're not alone in thinking that, because just a few days ago, one of the, you know, luminary families of our industry, the Andrew. Of of Casali media. Pen a piece, an ad exchanger, basically calling for the industry to stop supporting MFAs. Don't work, don't monetize, don't work with MFAs. 

[00:06:26] They're fraudulent. They're, they're bad. Yeah. It sounds like a truism. It sounds like an easy stance to have and I think it is an easy one to sort of make. But this is where I push back a little bit and I'm like, wait, what do you mean? Like I don't, there's nothing wrong with buying traffic, by the way. 

[00:06:41] People have been buying traffic to run against quote unquote premium domains like the largest, most. Well-known publisher brands have been buying traffic to traffic against sites they need to run, like if I have an IO that I have to deliver half a million impressions and I haven't been able to generate that. 

[00:06:56] I buy traffic to fill that IO that's been going [00:07:00] on at premium, quote unquote premium publisher brand. Sites since the beginning of the internet. So this idea of, well, it's buying traffic bad. Well, maybe not, right? And again, if the advertiser knew that that publisher might be buying traffic and is, it's okay, it's part of the terms and conditions of their io, then I, it's not a problem in my opinion. 

[00:07:17] So buying traffic isn't necessarily a problem. The next is, you know, okay, well maybe it's ad load. Well, what's an appropriate quote, unquote, there's plenty of sites that run. Completely, or, you know, tons of ads. We talked to these local news broadcasters and they're probably all organic traffic and they have really crappy ad experiences, um, for their users. 

[00:07:38] And, you know, is that legitimate or not? And I think, you know, we as an industry really should start focusing on what's a bad behavior. And by the way, if quote unquote, these MFA sites get wiped out because we start saying, you know, what, websites with this many have ads, or this amount of ad load time or whatever, should get blocked. 

[00:07:54] From, from general ad campaigns, so be it, right? I'm perfectly comfortable with that point of view, but I think this [00:08:00] sort of standpoint that, oh, this is a category of sites we can't do, I would say, you know, no. What we really need to do is stop fraud, stop sites that run bot traffic, and then steal the dollars that would be going to legitimate publishers running legitimate businesses. 

[00:08:15] Yeah, that's a problem. Yeah, I mean, I think, I, I think that's always, that's a truism, that's something that people don't want to see happen. Um, but there is a, a nuance in terms of, um, you know, if there's, um, traffic, you know, first of all, I guess a couple of things. One is the buying of traffic for a publisher. 

[00:08:37] Um, I think you talked about this a little bit in terms of, you know, consumer acquisition is really important. Um, the social networks do that at scale. I think the challenge here, to get it back to the ad exchanger discussion was why would a publisher be putting it on a subdomain and potentially, you know, and this is up for conjecture, are they hiding it? 

[00:08:59] And I think that's [00:09:00] sort of the issue that showed up here. You know, 'cause probably 'cause they don't wanna tarnish their main domain, right? So there's, well when you mean by tarnish it's the user experience. They want a different user experience and you know, and by the way, just I think a, a day or two ago, another premium publisher. 

[00:09:17] So it's not just Forbes originally. Like, oh, Forbes is doing this, they're the one bad Apple. And then a couple days ago, another vendor company called, since found. Spin magazine, spin.com, doing kind of the same thing. A slight difference is they were basically leasing out a subdomain to an MFA company and the MFA company is running a mirror of one of their own sites. 

[00:09:40] And so it wasn't even spin content, at least in the Forbes case. It was Forbes content. Just a very different ad experience. In the spin example, it wasn't even their content. It was, you know, this, this third party's. MA content, right? That was running. And so that's, that's, you know, that's a little different. 

[00:09:58] And I think that's a question you, and so [00:10:00] the, the problem in that case, well think that brings up a good point, which is like, how is it that, uh, it's not possible to just know, like figuring out that that was an MFA company running it, you know, like how come they didn't just know that from, you know, the programmatic process and the option that's, that's being run. 

[00:10:21] And, and, you know, that was your reaction. You're, yeah. Uh, to me was like, wait a second. S why? It seems like the buyer should know that this isn't really standard spin content isn't that, you know, that there's a third party involved in publishing. Like, how did this vendor find out if it's not in the bid request? 

[00:10:36] You know, the ad request. And my answer is. Well, Tom, none of that data is in the bid request. Right? Which is why these third party verifications companies, like since is an example of one exist because you get a URL, you run it through a third party and they tell you information about that. And that's kinda one of the problems, which is by the way, a whole discussion onto itself, getting into the weeds of how does the programmatic ecosystem work and, and how [00:11:00] do bid requests work and what's the information in it and what's not. 

[00:11:02] Why are there these holes as to people not knowing what they're buying. And in this case, right, the assumption would be you see a URL from spin, right? spin.com. It might, it, you know, you, it could be dub dub dub, that's spin.com. It could be slideshows, that's spin.com. So there's always subdomains in there too. 

[00:11:22] In this case, it was like dub dub dub three, kinda like Forbes, some other subdomain right under spin. And it was running this third party mirrored site. And, and you know your reaction to, well, Todd, why can't, isn't that visible? I said, no, the, actually, the researcher, this. Not research. So the verification company would've had to have gone to spin site, look at the page code, and then realized, oh, this is coming from another company, content iq, which is owned by a company called Perian, which is an Israeli media company. 

[00:11:47] We've been around a long time, so there's, again, nothing wrong with MFA. There's nothing wrong with running it on a third party domain. I think the question is, in this case was Spin and content IQ duping [00:12:00] advertisers into thinking they were buying ads against reviews of the latest song. Artist tour, whatever, or running it on a mirrored site, a mirrored MA site. 

[00:12:12] We didn't talk about this, but I start starting to have like original ideas again, and it's like, would it be the case that. You just have a lower price for organic versus paid traffic or something like that. You could Right. That's the thing. And again, to, to my point of view in all of this, and, and for people who aren't aware, I built and ran a DSP demand side platform, the software that buyers used to buy advertising programmatically for a decade. 

[00:12:40] So deep in the weeds of, of, of understanding of how the buying and selling of programmatic ads work and. If, I think I've always a big point of view, which is it's up to the buyers, right? In these, in the DSPs, who's use the traders, some, that's another term people use in terms of the buying and selling of, of these ads. 

[00:12:57] If you're, if you're a trader buying these ads, as long [00:13:00] as you know what, what you're buying, I. And you're, and you're comfortable with what you're paying for. I think that's, you're, you're raising a great point. Like, yeah, I'm okay. This might be lower quality traffic, so I'm fine paying a penny CPM for this instead of $5. 

[00:13:13] Yeah. I think the demand side has, it can be very righteous in saying we don't want our advertisers to, to see any of this kind of traffic. But then you have on the publisher side and the supply side, the supply side platforms, a lot of sort of hushed kind of like disagreement because. They know that the advertisers also say they want cheap breach, and they know that their publishers need to make money and they need to fill their iOS or whatever. 

[00:13:38] It's so there's a part of this discussion that's just not happening, and it, it, it used to be, we used to say MFA. It was a, you know, stand stood for me for advertising was kind of this pejorative, fraud, gut reaction sort of thing that you had Tom and others. Yeah. And you know, again, you were kind of stunned as I kind of started standing up for these [00:14:00] people. 

[00:14:00] I was, you know, my, well, and, and my point of view is that there's lots of traffic and there's lots of price points for ads. And again, if the buyer is aware of what they're getting, then. And it's legal, like US law, legal, or you know, Europe and EU and whatever. As long as it's legal, I think it should be, um, up to that buyer to make that decision. 

[00:14:22] Now, the challenge of course, that we're getting into too is, are, is that information getting to the buyer? Yeah. Is that information, you know, and I think that's where degrees of separation and fraud start to show up, which is I'm absolutely against. Buyers being duped, right? Like that is a problem and we should stamp that out as an industry Abso fricking lly. 

[00:14:43] Well, I think that may be, and we're probably coming to the time on this one, is that could be another discussion that we have in our next podcast, because I think that. There's, there are other examples where that duping we might, we might have better examples to talk through. And I [00:15:00] think that's fundamentally where a lot of these problems start to come up, you know, as sort of as a closing thought, which is if, if the information is credible and buyers and sellers can transact in a open and transparent and probably verified manner, great. 

[00:15:17] Let them transact how they wish. The challenges are, I think, 'cause we're gonna find out more and more, which is because there's lots of little loopholes and gaps in information and knowledge, there are opportunities for people to get duped. And I think that is something that we all want to see go away. 

[00:15:33] And that, you know, bad behavior is bad behavior and we should stamp that out with a puree as much as we can. Yeah, and you, you know, you hear some, some people saying that the end of third party cookies might, you know, or, or measuring for outcomes versus say, viewability and clicks and things might solve these problems, but they might not. 

[00:15:57] So 'cause, because the root cause of publishers [00:16:00] not making enough money remains. So. Good discussion, and thank you everyone for listening to the first episode of the Middleman. See you next time.