The case for and against publishers buying paid traffic 

Publishers haven’t forgotten the paid-traffic reckoning of 2023, when the ANA’s report on MFA sites prompted agencies to slam the brakes on arbitrage inventory. That crackdown cast a long shadow over paid traffic in general, and even reputable publishers now approach the tactic far more cautiously for fear of being swept onto MFA blocklists. 

Not all paid traffic is created equal, though – and that’s where the tension lies.

That tension has turned paid traffic into one of the most divisive tools in the publisher playbook, with a clear case for using it as a survival strategy, and an equally clear case against how easily it can slide into arbitrage. 

The case for

On one end, paid traffic is just classic marketing: a way to bring new readers in and build a long-term, loyal audience, even if that means taking a loss on the first pageview. 

In this “good” version, a publisher might pay $0.20 to promote a strong piece of journalism or a subscription offer on Facebook (or any other channel), knowing they’ll lose money on that first click. The long-term play is that a meaningful slice of those visitors will subscribe, sign up for newsletters, or start returning directly, so the paid click is viewed as a reader acquisition cost rather than an attempt to squeeze profit from a single visit. 

“Paid traffic is probably a necessity for the long‑term health of any web publisher,” said Chris Kane, founder of Jounce Media. “It’s hard to argue against a publisher using paid traffic as a mechanism to grow a loyal audience.”

Publishers have also long used paid traffic to drive audiences to branded content that sits on custom campaign URLs, where it’s harder to get organic discovery. In that context, paid is a distribution tool for advertiser-funded content, not an arbitrage play.

“Acquired traffic is sometimes necessary to deliver on direct campaigns,” said Justin Barton, svp of digital strategy and partnerships at publisher Black Enterprise. “As long as the math works to both deliver the impressions and gain margin, most publishers will go that route rather than under-deliver on a campaign. MFA usually doesn’t come into effect if programmatic pipes are not accessed,” he added.  

But beyond this straightforward audience‑building use case sits a more awkward, but increasingly common, set of tactics where paid traffic starts to look like arbitrage on paper, even if the underlying content is solid.

A typical scenario is where a publisher has a genuinely strong, revenue-generating article: perhaps with private marketplace deals attached, or highly endemic content that certain advertisers really want, explained Kane. They then buy cheap clicks from Facebook (or another channel) to drive more readers to it. So that publisher might pay three cents per click to that page, and make four cents on the resulting landing page. 

“So it is arbitrage, but like, is that bad arbitrage? Do we feel good about that arbitrage?” said Kane.

That’s one of the big questions publishers are wrestling with. “You get a lot of premium publishers that have sort of experimented with this, or have heard their peers are experimenting with this, and they feel very unclear about like: ‘if I do that, am I going to all of a sudden get marked ‘made for advertising,’ and all the advertisers block me?’ and I think they just… live with that uncertainty,” added Kane. 

The case against

Bad arbitrage is the old-school MFA playbook: buying ultra cheap clicks at scale, sending them to low-quality pages crammed with ads – 20 to 30 impressions per minute, as Kane put it – with no real organic audience and no expectation that those users will ever come back. It’s a model that lives and dies on first-visit arbitrage and is one agencies largely stamped out after 2023. 

Yet, many publishers are buying paid traffic and experimenting at the “acceptable edge” in ways that can look like arbitrage from the outside, noted Kane. 

For all the nervousness around being tarred as MFA, the pressure to replace lost audiences is already reshaping how some publishers use paid traffic to lay out their pages.

“The traffic level declines that many authentic, premium publishers are experiencing have pushed some to reconsider their ad placements, and we have seen pages suddenly riddled with one too many – and often intrusive – ad units,” said Elli Papadaki, svp of global supply for ad tech vendor Onetag and former programmatic lead for Condé Nast and The Financial Times. That’s especially true when revenue relies heavily on display, she added.

And there are quieter warning signs, like publishers whose traffic is almost entirely paid and whose ad performance lags far behind sites with real organic audiences, despite their claims that they’re simply “building audiences.”

Even when the site looks normal and isn’t an obvious MFA farm, paid/arbitrage traffic can still underperform badly, which drags more publishers into the MFA-block list territory. So the issue is that legitimate publishers can be misclassified as MFA just by being in the paid-traffic game – not by using overtly nefarious tactics. “It’s a huge headache for publishers,” added Kane. 

In some cases, vendors that have MFA lists are keeping the maximum thresholds of what publishers can buy, before they are red-flagged, purposely ambiguous. The logic: prevent publishers from “going to the max” of what they can buy, said a separate ad tech vendor exec, who requested anonymity in exchange for candor. While that’s keeping publishers in an uncomfortable position of uncertainty, they stressed that being cautious over how much they rely on this kind of arbitrage is ultimately for the best. 

Publishers have previously told Digiday they have sailed too close to the wind by doing this, and been red-flagged by DSPs.

Others are more blunt about publishers needing to avoid any form of arbitrage. Alessandro De Zanche, publisher consultant of ADZ Strategies and former News UK exec, sees the whole game as fundamentally corrosive to what publishers sell: a distinctive environment built from quality content, a good user experience, audience trust, high-quality data and preserved privacy. “It is a betrayal of everything that is unique in a media brand’s proposition,” he said. “It is a cheap trick, equivalent to stopping strangers on the street and paying them $5 each to pretend they are attending a sponsored event, just to justify a full room and the sponsor’s money being received on the premise of a $6 return per attendee.”

The rise of generative AI only sharpens that concern.

AI will raise the baseline for “good enough” utility content, allowing MFAs to churn out accurate, serviceable articles that attract anonymous, unengaged human visits, noted De Zanche. “The only way to differentiate premium media from MFAs might soon not be the quality of their content, but the trust and loyalty of their audiences. Now you tell me where paid traffic lies in this picture,” he added. 

Kane points to a few red lines: if you’re cranking up ad load specifically on paid clicks, if paid makes up the vast majority of your traffic without feeding organic return visits, or if you want to be absolutely safe from MFA lists, in which case having no paid traffic at all is the only real guarantee.

Another must-do is to ensure everyone sees the same ad experience, regardless of how they arrived, stressed Kane. “Are you delivering an aggressive ad load to people that come from paid traffic sources in order to make the arbitrage math work?”

Publishers can’t afford to walk away from paid traffic – but until the industry draws clearer lines between “audience building” and arbitrage, every extra click they buy also exposes them a little more to MFA risk. And from a buyer’s perspective, there’s little comfort in how publishers label their tactics: if paid clicks keep delivering low-intent audiences and weak outcomes, it all looks like the same bad arbitrage in the end. 

“Whether traffic is paid for or organic, what really matters is user engagement and whether the brand gets an outcome fulfilled,” said Papadaki. 

— Sara Guaglione contributed to reporting.