MFA (Made For Advertising) - still a thing?

misterb

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curious if MFA is still a thing -- real content, not autospun stuff. Anyone care to share their favorite alternatives to Adsense? I hate to put all my eggs in one basket, and long ago I got my adsense account banned for supposed shady actions that I DID NOT commit. I tried appealing and never got anywhere. It was just a mentally defeating moment - one that marked my temporary exit from online marketing. I do realize I could have just spun up a LLC and gotten a new account.
 
MFA sites are ranking all over the place, but the new monetization method is Amazon. Amazon review sites are everywhere now.

The best alternative to Adsense if you want cost per click revenue is Media.net, which also has cost per view ads as does Adsense, although more heavily. There are a lot of people who blog about how they got banned from Adsense and went on to make a killing with Media.net.

Beyond those, there's countless CPM networks, native advertising networks, and more. I know people now that opened my eyes past Adsense, who are making $10k - $15k a month with one single CPM network, and some who are doing even better who set up their own ad server with header bidding and joined every network they could find. Some include Adsense and some don't.

I personally like Amazon because it's less about traffic volume and more about traffic intent, which is easier for me to work with, versus trying to compete for big volume keywords or learning traffic arbitrage.
 
Samwise89 said:
doing even better who set up their own ad server with header bidding and joined every network they could find
Click to expand...

Side question about header bidding. My assumption was that you need to generate at least 1 million ad impressions to start considering header bidding. Is it true or not?
 
Handel said:
Side question about header bidding. My assumption was that you need to generate at least 1 million ad impressions to start considering header bidding. Is it true or not?
Click to expand...

I don't think this is necessarily true. I think the real determiner is how many ad networks you can get accepted into. You can make the most out of 100 thousand impressions using this method, or you can make the most out of 100 million.

It's really just about maximizing every impression by making the networks compete per ad versus having to prioritize them in a waterfall, where if the first one can't meet your CPM Floor on that impression the next gets a shot (with a lower floor). The 4th network in your waterfall might have the highest CPM for that impression, but you never made it that low because the 3rd offered you a much lower CPM but was acceptable based on the floors you set at each network. It's just a way to avoid that problem of cascading CPM floors based on fill rates.
 
Yes, getting accepted into ad network looks like a major roadblock. I once stumbled upon this spreadsheet, where they list know ad networks. Based on the numbers in 'min mo ad imps' column I through that there's nothing to do if you don't count your impressions in millions. Can you recommend at least a couple of networks worth trying?
 
Handel said:
Can you recommend at least a couple of networks worth trying?
Click to expand...
  • Adsense
  • Media.net
  • Sovrn
  • MediaVine
  • Amazon CPM
  • AdThrive
  • BlogHer
  • Ezoic
  • Monumetric
These are ones with reasonable impression expectations that I've either used myself or I know someone using them. Many have no minimum monthly impressions limit.

Adsense is the classic with CPC and CPM ads.

Media.net is the secondary that has a pretty acceptable RPM for having 100% fill rates. Their CPC's are really high too, which can really push your RPM through the roof.

Amazon CPM isn't bad but they don't have the greatest fill rates yet.

Sovrn pissed me off because they're letting advertisers serve 100's of HTTP requests per ad (the buyers have to be double and triple brokering data or something)., but they were okay in general. Abysmal fill rates, but who cares when header bidding. In a waterfall it's a waste of your time.

MediaVine works like Adsense Auto Ads and Ezoic, where you drop a tag in your header and it places ads for you. I know someone (on this forum actually, I won't out them. Maybe they'll talk to us about it if they read this) getting $20+ RPM's from them right now over 3 million impressions a month (you can do the math there), but they're displaying an absurd number of ads too, but this is on a gallery site with lazy loading, so this person also gets nearly 100% viewability too, which I'm sure attracts advertisers.

Ezoic is an auto-optimizer for Adsense plus their own network of stuff I believe, as well as access to the Google Display Network. They're not as attractive any more now that Auto Ads exists and there's no limit on the number of ads you can serve from Adsense, but you could still look at them. They aren't a traditional CPM network though, so heads up on that.
 
Thanks a lot for the details. I'll check Media.net and MediaVine first and look for ways to implement header bidding. This will take out my spare time for sure :smile:
 
@MrMedia, I never actually did it. I looked at it in anticipation of joining a lot more ad networks once my impressions were higher, and ultimately realized that wasn't the route I needed to take in my site. But in my adventures of learning about it I boiled down the options to two:
  • prebid.js
  • Double Click for Publishers (DFP)
prebid.js is a system you run yourself. DFP is a Google ad exchange system that lets you add 3rd parties into your bidding system. It's supposed to be faster than header bidding because it skips some steps involved with the classic process.

Here's some info you can look at to get an idea of what's involved and if you want to dive down the rabbit hole. One of these pages made the estimate that it takes nearly 100x as much work to get set up, but then you don't have to keep tweaking it like you do with testing in a waterfall setup.
If anyone runs a CPM advertising operation, like a viral site, Google News site, whatever... Definitely look into this. You can asynchronously accept bids from a ton of advertisers and then only load the winner, versus cascading through a waterfall that takes forever with 1000's of HTTP requests. Faster & more money.
 
Awesome man, thank you for this. It really is a rabbit hole that I feel I am going to have to get into.

Always makes me nervous tampering with ad set ups that have been working well but the reward to risk ratio seems like it could be worth it...
 
There are many websites like BlogHer, MediaVine, Monumetric But my personal experience is with Adsense. I have been using this platform from past one year and still using. It’s a good option to make money with CPM ads. There is also no limit on the maximum number of ads so you can enjoy unlimited advertisement.
 
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