07/19/2023

NewsGuard Announces No MFAs Service: Inclusion and Exclusion Lists to Protect Brands from Wasting Budgets on Made-for-Advertising News Sites

Brands now have a practical solution to avoid $20 billion in poor marketing investment in MFAs as identified by the Association of National Advertisers.

In response to an eye-opening report last month from the Association of National Advertisers documenting rampant, inadvertent waste undermining the integrity of the programmatic advertising ecosystem, NewsGuard today announced a “No MFAs Service.”

 

 

(July 19, 2023 — New York) The ANA June 2023 study on Programmatic Media Supply Chain Transparency identified a crisis of wasted spending by brands on what the trade group calls Made-for-Advertising websites (MFAs). The report found that more than 21% of programmatic spending goes to these low-quality, low-performing sites—wasting $20 billion in brand spending.

To meet this challenge, NewsGuard today is announcing the availability to brands of inclusion and exclusion lists specifically compiled to meet the ANA definition of MFAs: The NewsGuard No-MFA Inclusion List and the NewsGuard MFA Exclusion List.

NewsGuard protects brands from their ads appearing on thousands of these low-quality websites posing as news publishers. For example, the Santa Monica Observer appears to be a classic MFA. It has published many false claims, most notoriously the falsehood that Paul Pelosi, the husband of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, was attacked by a gay lover. Ads for dozens of blue-chip brands appeared alongside this disproven conspiracy theory. 

The business model for this website, and many MFAs like it, is to collect programmatic ad revenue using whatever headlines, articles, and images work best—regardless of their truth or falsity—to attract the social media likes and shares that lure readers to the site so that they see a programmatic ad.

The ANA study demonstrated the scale of media wastage and brand risk in the advertising industry, reporting that:

• Made-for-Advertising sites represent 21% of total programmatic ad impressions.
• Advertisers are wasting 23% of programmatic budgets—and could achieve $20 billion in efficiency gains in the $88 billion programmatic industry.
• Average campaigns run on 44,000 websites, many of which are low quality and contribute to media waste.
• Buyers and sellers do not have equal access to information and data about media inventory quality, resulting in overspending and waste.

NewsGuard’s proprietary brand-safety inclusion and exclusions lists protects brands from this wastage on MFA sites. This brand safety protection makes the advertising industry more transparent, providing human-sourced reliability ratings for news websites to aid decision-making, protecting brands from wasting budgets on misinformation and other low-quality sites, and enabling brands to invest in quality journalism instead. The ANA study specifically recommended inclusion lists as the best protection against MFAs, recommending that advertisers should “prioritize the creation and use of website ‘inclusion’ lists versus any focus on ‘exclusion’ lists.”

“NewsGuard’s extensive, humanly curated inclusion lists are the best of that best protection,” said NewsGuard co-CEO Gordon Crovitz. “They provide broad reach with the assurance that a trained NewsGuard analyst has recently read and vetted the site.”

How does NewsGuard protect brands from MFA sites?

NewsGuard’s journalist-sourced data helps supply partners and brands with both inclusion and exclusion lists, depending on a brand’s approach.

NewsGuard’s inclusion lists are powered by its journalist-sourced reliability data. As noted, the ANA report encourages brands to use inclusion lists as a failsafe way to protect brands from MFA sites and media wastage by carefully targeting high-quality inventory. 

NewsGuard’s inclusion list is the safest option on the market for brands when it comes to news, because:

• Every website on NewsGuard’s inclusion list has been vetted and rated by human beings, not AI, on a team of expert journalists, ensuring full transparency around its methodology
• For sites that fail one of NewsGuard’s nine criteria, its analysts have contacted the site for comment, conducting proper due diligence and giving publishers the chance to improve their practices
• NewsGuard ratings are updated regularly, including when major changes occur in a site’s practices, so brands benefit from the most up-to-date data on trustworthiness
• There is no other dataset on the market that covers the news and information websites that account for 95% of online engagement with the news, each rated by misinformation experts, not AI or other non-transparent approaches

In addition to inclusion lists, NewsGuard offers the alternative of up-to-date exclusion lists of unreliable news sites. These include the new category of Unreliable AI-generated News sites (UAINs) identified and tracked by NewsGuard, ensuring brands avoid these AI-generated websites and their inventory. NewsGuard’s list of UAINs now stands at 347 and counting, and partners are able to access this site list to augment their exclusion lists.

To learn more about how NewsGuard works with brands, advertisers, and agencies to steer clear of MFA news sites and invest proactively in quality journalism for better ROI and less media wastage, reach out to our team at partnerships@newsguardtech.com.

 

About NewsGuard 

Launched in March 2018 by media entrepreneur and award-winning journalist Steven Brill and former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz, NewsGuard provides credibility ratings and detailed “Nutrition Labels” for thousands of news and information websites. NewsGuard rates all the news and information websites that account for 95% of online engagement across the U.S., U.K., Canada, Germany, France, Austria, Italy, and now in Australia and New Zealand. NewsGuard products include NewsGuard ratings, BrandGuard, which helps marketers concerned about their brand safety, and the Misinformation Fingerprints catalog of top false narratives online.

In February 2023, the company launched NewsGuard for AI, which provides the leading tools to train generative AI models to avoid spreading misinformation. Generative AI models such as Microsoft Bing Chat use the Misinformation Fingerprints to recognize and avoid spreading the top false narratives online and use the NewsGuard ratings to differentiate between generally reliable sources of news and information and untrustworthy sources so that the machines can be trained to treat these sources differently.

In 2022, BrandGuard began to include ratings of television news and information programs and networks using criteria similar to those used to score websites but adapted for the video medium. NewsGuard’s TV ratings are the first to go beyond its initial ratings of websites. In May 2023, NewsGuard announced that it is also rating news and information podcasts, working with three of the largest audio platforms, which will help advertisers gain confidence in supporting highly rated podcasts. Ratings for CTV and OTT news programming and news and information podcasts are now available for licensing.

NewsGuard’s ratings are conducted by trained journalists using apolitical criteria of journalistic practice.

NewsGuard’s ratings and Nutrition Labels are licensed by browsers, news aggregators, education companies, and social media and search platforms to make NewsGuard’s information about news websites available to their users. Consumers can also access NewsGuard’s website ratings by purchasing a subscription to NewsGuard, which costs AU$6.95/month, NZ$6.95/month, US$4.95/month, €4.95/month or £4.95/month, and includes access to NewsGuard’s browser extension for Chrome, Safari, and Firefox and its mobile app for iOS and Android. The extension is available for free on Microsoft’s Edge browser through a license agreement with Microsoft. Hundreds of public libraries globally receive free access to use NewsGuard’s browser extension on their public-access computers to give their patrons more context for the news they encounter online. For more information, including to download the browser extension and review NewsGuard’s ratings process, visit newsguardtech.com.