This month, a special guest post by Max Gideon, CEO of Advanced Curation

There was a time when open exchange buying represented everything programmatic advertising was supposed to be: efficient, scalable, democratic, and transparent. You put your budget into the DSP, set a target audience and let the algorithm find your audience across millions of properties.

Today, the open web is rapidly turning into a digital graveyard filled with AI-generated content, ghost apps, and continuous ambient videos that loop. Generative AI has made the cost of producing content effectively zero. As a result, bad actors are deploying infinite "Made-For-Advertising" (MFA) websites and content farms faster than blocklists can catch them.

If your media plan still relies on open exchange buying, you’re likely no longer accessing a majority set of human attention. Open exchange buying isn’t a viable strategy given the recent profusion of fake content; however, inventory curation has emerged as a solution to reclaim inventory quality and fidelity.

Ad fraud used to require heavy duty effort. To run a classic MFA operation, someone had to scrape articles, set up WordPress sites, buy cheap traffic from social media networks, and pack the pages with auto-refreshing display ads. It took time, coordination, and manual labor. Generative AI changed the tactic entirely.

Every sales leader knows the feeling. You walk into a pipeline review with a number you believe in, and twenty minutes later, you're defending every line item to a CEO who just wants to know what's actually going to close.

HubSpot Sales Hub ends that conversation. Every deal, every rep's activity, and every buyer signal are all in one place and updated automatically. So your forecast is built on what's actually happening. And when you present that number, you can stand behind it.

Get a demo

Today, autonomous scripts spin up thousands of unique domains in a day. LLMs generate endless amounts of SEO-optimized articles, complete with fake images and realistic author bios. On mobile, developers use AI tools to quickly churn out simple apps designed solely to run ads in the background or auto-refresh on every tap. On Connected TV, continuous AI-generated ambient video streams run endlessly to soak up premium CPMs. Some of these have even bled into well-known and trusted FAST environments. This is no longer just a web issue. It is a full crisis across every media type. 

Traditional brand safety vendors relied on post-bid analysis or static domain blocklists. But when 50,000 new AI-generated domains and fake apps appear every single week, blocklisting becomes a game of whack-a-mole you’re guaranteed to lose. By the time a site is flagged as MFA, the creators have already extracted your money, abandoned the domain, and spun up new ones.

Another issue point is that DSPs are trained to optimize for metrics like viewability, CTR, and efficient CPMs. AI slop sites are engineered specifically to play into these performance metrics.

A fake web page will feature auto-refresh scripts, floating ad units, and layouts to ensure 90%+ viewability scores. To a DSP’s algorithm, an MFA farm looks like the most performant, cost-effective inventory on the internet. The platform buys more of it because it is doing exactly what it was programmed to do. MFA farms know the game, and they’re designed to win agency spend.

Another major issue is the open exchange is still plagued by complex, messy supply paths. Resellers and arbitrage networks obfuscate where an impression actually originates. Ads.txt and app-ads.txt, designed to clarify supply paths, have become insanely large lists with thousands of entries. Dollars meant for high-quality journalism or premium streaming apps end up being siphoned away into MFA farms long before they reach a real content creator.

As the open marketplace falls into disarray, the industry is shifting toward a model that prioritizes strict human oversight and dynamic signal verification: Curation Platforms.

Curation flips traditional programmatic buying on its head. Instead of bidding on the open web and working to remove bad inventory after the fact, curation starts with a clean, verified supply pool and layers premium data, contextual signals, and high-attention inventory directly into curated deal IDs. Curation works the opposite way - these platforms know the inventory that’s authentic and performs. By creating a key set of reviewed, audited, and safe properties, a curator has done the legwork to ensure no MFA is allowed through the door.

Instead of navigating thousands of unverified publisher connections, buyers transact through curated marketplaces where every single domain, mobile app, and CTV bundle has been vetted before a single bid request is issued. The industry’s growing problem with MFA content isn’t going to disappear. It’s up to the agencies to purchase adeptly and starve the bad actors from the very thing they desire - brand dollars.

Don’t forget to click on the advertiser (Hubspot) - every click helps!

Cory