Made for Advertising (MFA) websites – auto-generated, low quality content that exists just to host advertising – have emerged as this summer’s favorite object of hand-wringing in some advertising circles. If that’s what’s been keeping you up nights, you’ll be happy to hear that media buying agency GroupM is banning them from its inclusion lists, using Jounce Media’s MFA blacklist. Now you can go back to worrying about shark attacks.
t was fun while it lasted, but the “how cool is that?” stage of generative AI adoption is now being replaced by the boring work of figuring which products are best for your purpose. Arthur is making things a bit less painful with Arthur Bench, an open source tool to compare performance of large language model systems. They’ve also published the first in a series of comparisons among popular products.
There are plenty of reports on the growth or shrinkage of different ad channels, but I don’t usually bother to share them with you, Dear Reader. Still, news that summertime viewing of live broadcast TV fell 25% since last year seems shocking enough to mention. Viewing will probably increase in the fall with the return of football and basketball, but it’s still a huge shift.
Microsoft has confirmed that Reddit has blocked its Bing search engine from crawling content; Reddit seems to have blocked DuckDuckGo too. Reddit content will still appear in Google search results, but then Google has paid Reddit $60 million to allow it to train its AI models on that content. Reddit says the block has nothing to do with the Google deal: okay.