Thursday night I found myself sitting in the Las Vegas airport, stranded with a few thousand other CES go-ers thanks to a delayed flight home. As I do sometimes, I pulled out my phone and opened Facebook—just to pass a few minutes with some mindless scrolling.
A few minutes in, I had a genuine “ah hah” moment.
As I scrolled past AI-generated images, melodramatic headlines, and suspiciously verbose copy, a question clicked into place:
How much of Facebook’s content can now be technically classified as MFA?
A quick refresher on MFA
A few years back, Chris Kane made waves by coining the term MFA — Made for Advertising. It gave language to something many of us already recognized on the open web.
At a high level:
Made for Advertising (MFA) content is content created primarily to generate ad revenue rather than to inform, entertain, or provide genuine value to users. It is typically produced cheaply and at scale, optimized for clicks and impressions, and often characterized by sensational headlines, low editorial standards, and minimal original insight.
At the time, MFA was framed as an open web problem. Something buyers filtered out. Something publishers were warned away from. Something the ecosystem broadly agreed was low quality.
Look at your Facebook Feed:
Pull out your phone. Open the Facebook app. Look at the first ten stories in your feed.
When I did this experiment, 7 of the first 10 pieces of content fell into one of two buckets:
- Ads
- Click-driven, low-effort content optimized for engagement, not value
Here are real examples from my feed — not cherry-picked, just… there:
- “Rome’s Arena Secret: The Fate of Female Prisoners After the Games”
(accompanied by an obviously AI-generated image and a breathless, cinematic opening written to keep you scrolling)
- “This Is How a Woman’s Skull Looked After a Complex Facial Reconstruction Following a Car Accident”
(graphic imagery, minimal context, maximum emotional pull)
- “LOOK: This Dad Tattooed His Baby’s Heart Surgery Scars on His Own Chest — So His Child Will Never Feel Alone”
(manufactured sentiment, reposted endlessly across copycat pages)
- “BREAKING: Possibly the First Appearance in Its 50-Year Flying History, the ‘Doomsday Plane’ Appeared at LAX”
(urgent tone, speculative framing, recycled aviation trivia)
- “This Is the Part of Roman History They Do Not Teach in School”
(a sentence designed entirely to trigger curiosity, not convey insight)
Almost all of it is clearly engineered for clicks, reactions, and dwell time — not reader value.
What was left?
Out of the first ten items:
- Two legitimate news stories
- One sports highlight video
That’s it.
This is obviously a small sample size. But anecdotally, it matches what I’ve been experiencing for months. Conservatively, it wouldn’t surprise me if 30%-40%+ of Facebook’s feed is now effectively MFA — content that would be flagged as low quality or avoided entirely in the open web buying ecosystem.
The rules are different here
This is where things get interesting.
On the open web, MFA is treated as a systemic problem:
- Buyers block it
- Publishers avoid becoming it
- Platforms publicly commit to rooting it out
On Facebook, however, the platform itself increasingly is the MFA surface.
And advertisers are still pouring tens of billions of dollars into it.
It’s also getting worse over time
If you plotted Facebook content quality over the last few years, the trend line would be unmistakable:
- More AI-generated images
- More long-winded, pseudo-literary copy
- More shock, fear, outrage, and sentimentality
- Less editorial accountability
- Less obvious human intent
The feed increasingly feels optimized for scroll endurance, not insight.
The new chum box
There’s a deep irony here.
For years, the open web relied on bottom-of-article recommendation widgets — the infamous “chum boxes” from companies like Taboola or Outbrain. Over time, the industry largely decided that model was too low quality, too spammy, and too corrosive to trust.
So folks started moving away from it – Taboola and Outbrain have diversified their businesses and you see many fewer chum box ads that you did 10 years ago.
In a strange twist, Facebook now feels like the largest chum box in the world — except it’s not at the bottom of the article.
It is the article.
Same mechanics.
Same incentives.
ust embedded directly into the feed.
An uncomfortable question
Maybe this is just the inevitable result of optimizing relentlessly for engagement at global scale. Maybe it’s what happens when cheap content generation meets powerful distribution.
But I can’t shake the question I had sitting in that airport:
If Facebook were part of the open web, how much of its own inventory would advertisers actually be willing to buy?
And what does it say about the ecosystem that the answer might be… not very much.