Block MFA Sites from your AdSense Account

AdsBlacklist (ABL) is a relatively new service for publishers that carry Google AdSense advertisements. Ads Blacklist claims to be able to increase your revenues by filtering out MFA (made for adsense) and penny advertisers. They do this by creating a list of sites you can ad to your Competitive Ad Filter. The unfortunate thing of course is that Google's Competitive Ad Filter only allows you to add up to 200 URLs in the list, and there are a lot more than 200 MFA sites potentially targeting your site's keywords.

As far as I can tell, Ads Blacklist ranks their list by the MFA site's Alexa movement. They most likely cross tabulate that with the amount of reports the URL gets from their user base. Ads Blacklist counts on the contributions of its users to report suspected MFA URLs. At lastglance, they had 2449 sites and 1865 pending sites (suspected MFA sites which have not been "confirmed" yet).

ABL is a great idea, but is severely hampered by the fact that Ad Sense publishers can only enter 200 URLs into their competitive advertiser filters. There is a petition on ABL that wants to get Google to increase the size of the filter, but I personally don't think this will help much. MFA sites can register domains faster than users can report them, and since MFA is so profitable, the motivation for them to continue to register new domains and keep ahead of Ads Blacklist is very strong. Publishers really need to be able to set minimum click rates and cpm rates for the ads that show up on their pages.

We have used Ads Blacklist on some of our sites, and found that you can get a relatively small increase in CPM and CTR, but that for some keywords, the list of MFA sites is so huge that you just can't add them all. We have also tried it on individual sites in very specific niches that have separate adsense accounts (since they are managed by other individuals) and we found that these sites benefited most from the ABL. These sites did see temporary increases in CPM, but that over time, new MFA sites crept in to replace the old ones, and that we had to generate a new list of sites to add to the competitive advertiser filter.

Again, I personally believe that no "real" solution will be found in the near future, since Google, MFA creators, and even Advertisers (to some extent) all benefit from MFA. As long as conversions remain high for Advertisers, they aren't going to care (in our experience) how the consumer gets to their site to make a purchase. The only person in this value chain that is being taken advantage of is the publisher, since it is the publisher's content that attracted that consumer into clicking an ad in the first place.

All in all though, I think the ABL is a worthwhile service, and that anyone seeing their revenues dive into all-time lows should check out the ABL - it can provide you with a list to put in your competitive advertisers filter and that *may* help increase your income. Another great resource on the ABL site is the forums, and these are worth checking out even if you don't use the list. I encourage everyone affected by MFA to visit the ABL forums and contribute your experiences.

Check out AdsBlacklist at http://www.adsblacklist.com