Arbitrage "List" Sites - The Dirty Little Secret

CCarter said:
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Everytime you post about this It's like you are telling me I should really get into this business ASAP... I'm trying to lead a righteous path here...

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I'm trying to stay away from the dark side, but its pull is so strong... You are telling me Verizon is just spending money JUST to spend - with no fucks given...

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If they got daily budget to me, let me do my duty and help them out!
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I think you are kidding but in case someone really have some issues with "ethics" at this point, you could do this in a legit way also. It won't be that fast but, on the other hand you will be able to start it on a shoestring budget.
Just niche it down as much as possible (and as you like), and then use only traffic that in your opinion is going to convert best :happy: There you have it, WIN WIN situation.

Keep it 7-13 months and sell it :D Or if you want to really push it seriously keep it longer and work on it and then get some investment and kick it to the stars :happy:

Everyone will be happy, advertisers, publisher/s, partners and you will even keep your Adsense account for other bigger situations.

Let's be honest here, who needs seven figures a month? Really, it's just too much for most of us. Be happy just with stable GOOD four figures/M and once you got it try bigger "game" :wink:
 
miketpowell said:
You are exactly right. But maybe it would surprise you to know how many campaigns are running 10k/day spend levels by companies like this with pretty much no oversight beyond making sure the daily spend goals are reached. That's right it's not even a performance goal, it's a "make sure you spend at least $X every day".

I've seen it first hand with past work experience, in 2012, closing 500k-2mm quarterly IOs for large brands. All the work went into creating a plan to get that IO signed. After that it was a day or two of setting up the campaign and then letting it run on auto optimization for the next 3 months. More time is spent pulling reports to put together the weekly client deck than actually optimizing the campaign.

When I say, "Large advertisers are dumping money into online advertising without paying close attention to results." I'm not kidding. Verizon Wireless often tops the charts for online media buying for a single brand on any given month. Do you know the only metrics the Verizon media buying department that spend $40 million a quarter online in 2013 worked on was? CTR and CPC pretty much. The poor landing page optimization team caught all the flak for conversion % dropping significantly on all those amazingly cheap clicks the media buyers found.

What exactly has been going on internally at Google for the last few years I don't really have any insight into, I wish I did. But from all the evidence I've seen over the last few years it's hard to believe that Google is always doing their 100% best to shut down any site that provides low quality traffic. It seems much more like they are doing their best to maintain plausible deniability in the situation while maximizing profits while stupid money is being spent by advertisers and Google needs the inventory.

I brought this all up because I just wanted to share something with all of you and start a conversation about it. What's amazing to me is how "big" it is without really anyone else pointing it out in tech media that I've seen so far. Literally half of the advertisers on content networks are list based LPs doing things like this.

It's just amazing the kinds of things companies like Google can get away with to me. When I look at this screenshot http://imgur.com/KsYAz83 I just think how could anyone at Google possibly defend that red arrow being something any normal internet user would see as a CTA for the text ad about 300 pixels to the left of it. How in the world can they justify having it so far away from the ad text?

Lastly I try to think how I can learn/benefit from this. As much as the scumminess of Google in all this bothers me I do benefit from it after all. Having the the advertisers that aren't paying close attention bidding on the bad inventory keeps them away from bidding the prices up on the good inventory. I'd wager my display network CPAs would be noticeably higher if Google banned all these sites tomorrow while the big advertisers still have daily spend goals to meet.

Edit: If your a newbie to the online space do understand doing stuff like this could still easily get your Adsense account banned and it can be very difficult to get another one if you don't have the resources to do so. Just because someone else is getting paid 7 figures a month by Adsense with the layout they use they might just ban you when you do 5k on the exact same layout. The world is random and unfair like that.
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Yeah, no surprises with Verizon and their campaigns. Or any Fortune 500 company really when it comes to online spending. It's still a relatively small budget for any of these blue chip companies in the big picture. It's a strategy mix of dominating market share, branding and trying to acquire/retain customers all in the same click. Would be difficult to micro-manage down to exact conversion rates. Still likely better and more effective than a lot of the budget that goes to all the offline ads that nearly impossible to gather any metrics on.

Oh, forgot to mention on that Merck ad in your example (NuvaRing), in case you were doing research on it -- you might want to keep exploring alternatives and look up the NuvaRing's failure rate... it was responsible for my first child :smile: :smile:
 
I see these arbitrage plays constantly on Yahoo front page over the last decade. Publishers seem to come and go over time with different tactics and type of content. The viral theme is definitely "it" right now.

All of these types of sites seem to have a short shelf life so one has to wonder just how profitable (or lack of) they really are.
 
Now imagine when you take a strategy like this and toss in some top-notch original content instead of just copy-pasting, attracting links from the largest media companies in the world, shares from people with millions of followers... Things get real interesting. You can take it from being a riskier arbitrage play and pivot into being a media empire.
 
Sweet thread! The funny thing is that in the morning I decided to make one of those retarded viral sites, few hours later I am reading this thread here... hmmm I sense something in the air!
 
So I turned off Adblock to see how that page looked for me. Surprised to see an ad for google there. Also you need to click the arrow twice to actually visit the ad, so it's not as easy to click accidentally as it looks.

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After clicking once:
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Interesting. I've not seen that behavior yet. Does anyone know if that's new for the arrow ads? Im not an Adsense clicker so it might have been there all along. But if not, I wonder if that's their plausible deniability? Because when I'm using a tablet and I click something and it doesn't go, I assume I didn't make contact well or clicked barely off the side, and go again without thinking.
 
Kurtz said:
So I turned off Adblock to see how that page looked for me. Surprised to see an ad for google there. Also you need to click the arrow twice to actually visit the ad, so it's not as easy to click accidentally as it looks.

ggD55m4.jpg

After clicking once:
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The text ads with that arrow I've seen have all been just one-click to visit the ad.
 
Haven't seen a 2-click Adsense ad (except for text links). You may have clicked in the description area. Doing that will show the next set of info (denoted by those two dots at the bottom). Works like a slideshow. But if you click the arrow or main part of the ad it's just 1 click.

As for tablets and mobile, they made a change recently that made it harder to accidentally click ads.
 
backwoods said:
Oh, forgot to mention on that Merck ad in your example (NuvaRing), in case you were doing research on it -- you might want to keep exploring alternatives and look up the NuvaRing's failure rate... it was responsible for my first child :smile: :smile:
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haha thanks but nope wasn't looking it. I look at so many random things online when I'm clicking ads though I very well may have ended up on pages for re targeting for them though.

Some Fortune 500s certainly do it better than others. But you are right it's definitely the norm that they end up wasting a ton of money since the budgets are so huge.

MetaData said:
Now imagine when you take a strategy like this and toss in some top-notch original content instead of just copy-pasting, attracting links from the largest media companies in the world, shares from people with millions of followers... Things get real interesting. You can take it from being a riskier arbitrage play and pivot into being a media empire.
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This is a great point and kind of what I was going for when I brought this up. Discussions of how to apply these concepts in ways that are better than what's currently being done. You can have a great site with great content and just certain funnels that you design for this kind of stuff to get an extra boost.

Kurtz said:
After clicking once:
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This is very interesting thanks for the share! I've never seen that and it seems neither have some others.

It's a sign that Google is doing something to stop this. Also I was checking this out quite a bit the last few days and you can see the ad placements are varied. They don't always keep them in "trick" spots but try to balance it.
 
Here is more info:

Cruncher - what I have seen and noted:

1. This double click its sometimes limited to single ad units, it can and DOES seem to hit entire sites/accounts though
2. It seems to hit certain geo's, not always all
3. The sites that I consult for typically use paid traffic, and through a variety of geo and interest shaping have seen the initial drop gradually get better, although no site affected has returned to more than 50% normal ctr after a variety of experiments over a VERY short time scale.
4. The double click also effects the 'apple' variant ad [which surprisingly I've never read about here despite the level of 'expert knowledge' on display with the 'BS Card' that just got played]
5. All sites I've seen this on are 1m+ PV/M with a significant number being sub 1k on alexa/similar/compete
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Apparently this has been around for a few years. Here's a Tech Crunch article about it from 2012.

Jonathan Alferness, Google’s product director for mobile ads, said the company has already tackled the problem in its text and app promotion ad formats — those ads include a blue arrow, and if you tap on the ad, but not on the arrow, it enlarges into a “visit site” button, which you have to tap again to actually go to the advertiser’s site. In other words, if there’s some ambiguity about whether you really meant to select the ad, Google will ask you to confirm that it was intentional. The format was first tested a few years ago and became more widely available after AdMob was integrated with AdWords in June.
[techcrunch.com...]
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https://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adsense/4743227.htm
 
This article piqued my interest, and while I was rummaging around looking for traffic arbitrage articles I found this:

http://monetizepros.com/display-advertising/cpc-arbitrage-what-it-is-and-how-to-pull-it-off/

The page they used as their example.. HOLY SHIT!

It's just chock full of ads!

In my case study I mentioned how I was trying out this business model and I can't get enough clicks to even cover my costs. Maybe this was what I was missing?

I have enough FB Ads skill to get regular $0.02 and below clicks. So maybe I should try this again using this tactic? I'm very tempted..
 
For anyone looking to get into this, but who doesn't have the monetary means to start off with PPC, just buy a couple of dozen FB PVA accounts, an auto posting tool like Massplanner and start spamming groups. You'll easily get 1000's of clicks a day and get to find out what works and what doesn't.

Now instead of this viral crap, you might as well throw up a blog (10 pages are more than enough) in a high CPC niche (travel/finance/law), put some Adsense on it and bait horny guys with semi-nudes/fake videoimages/whatever and send them to this blog. If you're not at 3 figures a day after 5 days you're doing it terribly wrong.
 
The newest episode of South Park, called "Sponsored Content" was largely about this very topic of arrows ads misleading users into thinking they are moving to the next slide. Apparently there's more awareness of this than I realized. If not, there is now.
 
Ryuzaki said:
The newest episode of South Park, called "Sponsored Content" was largely about this very topic of arrows ads misleading users into thinking they are moving to the next slide. Apparently there's more awareness of this than I realized. If not, there is now.
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Plot twist, OP writes for South Park
 
It's still a nice way to make some good $ but it's going to be more difficult (it is already). Once those viral sites started popping out like shrooms after rain, it was signal it's time to look for something new. There is someone already testing some new setup and he is about to make a lot of $, or is doing right now.
 
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