Arbitrage "List" Sites - The Dirty Little Secret

miketpowell

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Hey guys I wanted to make this post as I've seen a number of you asking/discussing this.

On Native Ads right now there are so many click bait ads that are for list based articles it's insane. Now many people believe the basis of this is having content people share so even though it's a lost on the traffic you buy the share traffic becomes positive, that's wrong. Other people believe you need exclusive CPM deals you can only get once you have volume, that's wrong.

The "dirty little secret" that makes these sites work is using Adsense and helping Google rip off large Adwords advertisers that can't/don't track direct performance online.

The key is to get super high CTR on people that have just hit the first page of the list and are trying to click to the 2nd page. It has to do with how people use the internet and look for links.

Clicked random Revcontent ad to this page:

http://www.yourdailydish.com/galleries/these-before-after-couple-photos-prove-love-is-forever/

This is how it looked to me when I land on the page:

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That red arrow text ad is gonna have a ridiculous CTR. The website purposely makes sure there are no obvious places to click to begin the slide show. Users look for arrows pointing to the right or for blue underlined links pretty much. That red arrow is what people think starts the slide show.

First key though is making sure this isn't all the traffic - the overall CTR of the site is probably less than 2% by far still. Looking at this:http://www.similarweb.com/website/yourdailydish.com#overview you can tell the site is built off of arbitrage traffic buying. It had zero traffic 6 months now and is over 10mm/month just on desktop and it's all coming from display.

Lastly it's no coincidence what the ad is for. It's for a prescription drug which the company is spending a ton of money on but has no way to track that ad to a sale. The fact that Google has advertisers in Adwords right now dumping millions of dollars without being able to track performance is what is keeping this gravy train alive. This is only possible because Google is happy to rip off those advertisers right now. Once we hit another recession and ad dollars like this slow down Google is going to crack down again on it. But for now they are happy to make money off of it.

Now I'm not saying this is easy or didn't take that guy a ton effort to get things to where it is. But the business model is 100% dependent on that red arrow getting a huge CTR and providing a $50+ RPM page for the incoming arbitrage traffic while counting on Google letting you rip off their advertisers. All those other content ads are tiny on the total bottom line and just there to make it less obvious that 90%+ of the revenue in this model comes from one little text ad with a red arrow.
 
I'd say that if this interests you, strike now, but know also that you're essentially being a thief and scam artist.

If the advertisers don't sequentially block your site and reduce your income, you're going to lose that account to either smart pricing or an eventual ban when Google is forced to take a look at it instead of turning a blind eye.

Companies aren't going to pay for clicks with 1 second time on site before the user closes or clicks back for too long. They'll demand a way to manage the campaigns better (I feel like that already exists, but these companies have more money than care).

Basically, a couple little calculations on data and the culprits will rise to the top. This could possibly be leading to class action lawsuits that reaches all the way down the funnel to the publisher.
 
I honestly don't see Google blocking this anytime soon. They are making money hand over fist with this, and these viral sites keep popping up left and right. When I look at their earnings reports all I see is increases in their advertising revenue left and right, so they know the game, and it's GOOGLE not the advertiser, putting the arrows in the ad, so they have to know what's up.

If something happens I figure maybe it'll go down in 12 months from now, but even then, I dunno, this is a hard one to call. There has to be some serious backlash or people massively turning off Display Network completely.

This is some wild west shit going on right and now this post has me itching to create a viral site now...

Fuck it. I'm all in...
 
They don't even need the arrow, tbh. If they did they would turn off image ads in the settings and show nothing but text based ads with arrows.
 
Google ain't gonna do shit in Q4.

Google, Facebook, Bing, Amazon, etc... they don't do a damn thing in Q4 because of profits and their stock outlook in Q4.

Q1, prepare anus....
 
eliquid said:
Google ain't gonna do shit in Q4.

Google, Facebook, Bing, Amazon, etc... they don't do a damn thing in Q4 because of profits and their stock outlook in Q4.

Q1, prepare anus....
Click to expand...
Do you think on January this will come crashing down?
 
This is some wild west shit going on right and now this post has me itching to create a viral site now...

Fuck it. I'm all in...
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This is something I can get behind.

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Calamari said:
He's purely speculating.

If this soft of set up is your thing go ahead and do it until you can't.
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I'm just curious, I don't have the resources to create that big of a site and get it moving. I'm gonna stick with my current project for now, altough, I see some things that I could use from these sites to increase my RPM, but not set it up completely as the sites in the example.
 
TacoCat said:
I'm just curious, I don't have the resources to create that big of a site and get it moving. I'm gonna stick with my current project for now, altough, I see some things that I could use from these sites to increase my RPM, but not set it up completely as the sites in the example.
Click to expand...

It's not necessarily about having a big site. You can drive all of the traffic to one page. This is about arbitrage, not ranking. You're paying for traffic on one network, sending it to a page where you trick them into clicking ads that are worth enough that you make a profit at the end of the day. All you need to be able to do is have enough of a float to fund the initial campaign until Adsense pays you.
 
@Ryuzaki you gotta stop teasing me. I'm gonna blow all my money on trying this. :D

To anyone that decides to try this, create a secondary adsense account. So if you get banned, your primary account isn't banned. ** @miketpowell advice **

I've got a song for this thread:

 
TacoCat said:
To anyone that decides to try this, create a secondary adsense account.
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inb4 both accounts banned and

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(If someone didn't think to not do this on their primary account, they aren't going to know how to properly setup a second one.)

((But as long as you aren't breaking ToS on your primary account you should be fine...))

(((So make sure you read the terms carefully. But you'll also notice that a lot of it is phrased in a way that leaves things open for interpretation.)))
 
I think the point of the thread was to discourage click trickery. Seems to have had the oposite effect.

Must be the lure of "easy" money.

Trust me, it's not that easy.
 
Google tests different colors, fonts, arrows etc all the time.

Even the arrows themselves are something that they tested not all that long ago, and they found they increased ctr so they kept them. The introduction of the arrows seems to be what has given rise to pagination monetization.
 
I think it was either Title color or URL color when you could control it. Maybe you still can, I don't know, but it definitely was/is possible.
 
You can edit the settings in Adsense but regardless of the colors you pick, they will vary on your site. Not sure if that's due to Google tests or something the Advertisers do.
 
Come across this today after reading this thread this morning:

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I was very close to clicking one those ads accidentally underneath the main picture.
Cheeky buggers.
 
miketpowell said:
Lastly it's no coincidence what the ad is for. It's for a prescription drug which the company is spending a ton of money on but has no way to track that ad to a sale. The fact that Google has advertisers in Adwords right now dumping millions of dollars without being able to track performance is what is keeping this gravy train alive. This is only possible because Google is happy to rip off those advertisers right now. Once we hit another recession and ad dollars like this slow down Google is going to crack down again on it. But for now they are happy to make money off of it.
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Well, that particular ad (not-the-pill.com > NuvaRing.com is likely remarketing - i'm sure it's related to some other article or info you (or someone else) were visiting in the past.

Google makes it extremely easy for the advertiser to exclude any particular site they don't want to advertise on. I always go through the list in my dashboard and blacklist any sites or pages that I don't think are relevant to my target audience... or just plain junk sites like this doing shady CTR monkey business.

Google usually doesn't let publishers get very aggressive with their ad placements so if there are any complaints or issues they typically nip it pretty quickly.
 
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built said:
So how did they get that red button/arrow? All the ads I've seen have black buttons/arrows
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It's all random. Not everyone is going to see the same type of ad due to a number of variables (location, demographics, type of device, iOS vs Android, etc., Google is constantly testing...

This is what I see: a banner ad and then a blue arrow (remarketing)

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backwoods said:
Google makes it extremely easy for the advertiser to exclude any particular site they don't want to advertise on. I always go through the list in my dashboard and blacklist any sites or pages that I don't think are relevant to my target audience... or just plain junk sites like this doing shady CTR monkey business.
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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:

KsYAz83.jpg


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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miketpowell said:
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.
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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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