• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, Yesterday

Fairly or unfairly, Made for Advertising (MFA) sites do not have the highest reputation: Some would even call them clickbait.  

But they accounted for 10% of open programmatic web ad spend worldwide in Q1 2025, roughly $701 million, according to Made-For-Advertising Websites Benchmarks Report from Pixalate. 

But only 4% of open programmatic ads were flagged as MFA, down from 6% last December. 

Pixalate says it is sharing this data “not to impugn the standing or reputation of any entity, person or app, but, instead, to report findings and trends pertaining to the time period studied.” 

That said, MFA sites posed an invalid traffic (IVT) risk of 15%, compared to 12% for non-MFA sites. The risk is down from 18% in Q4 2024, but up from earlier months in that year. 

MFA sites enjoyed a 60% viewability, down slightly from the 62% seen in Q4 2004 but higher than the 58% reported in the first quarter of last year. But they topped non-MFA sites, which had viewability of 55% in Q4 2024 and Q1 2025. 

Regionally, Latin America had an MFA open programmatic ad spend of 17%, versus 10% for EMEA, 9% for North America and 3% for APAC. But 88% of MFA ad spend went to domains without a disclosed country of origin. 

The listing of the top five domains was as follows: 

• Private domain—55%
• (Blanks)—33%
• United Kingdom—5%
• United States—4%
• Canada—1%

Of all MFA domains, 50% were from private domains, compared to 26% for non-MFA sites. 

Pixalate's data science team analyzed 5+ billion open programmatic ad impressions globally in Q1 2025.