Agile Marketing

We are all familiar with the “get rich quick” schemes that have been around for years. Some prove successful, but most fall through. However, as the tech-savvy generation comes into their own, the next big money-making idea centers around website advertising. An article published by Business 2.0 Magazine describes a new phenomenon known as “traffic arbitrage.” This controversial practice is netting thousands of dollars a day for adept web developers. According to the article, “The concept is straightforward: Buy cheap traffic for your website from one search engine, get paid more for the ads streamed from another. Arbitrage is a major revenue source for some businesses.” The process is actually quite ingenious and surprisingly simple. Here are the step-by-step instructions describing how anyone could do this:

• Create your site, but don’t waste time or money buying an expensive domain name. It is unnecessary, because you can make the ads do all the work for you.
• Fill your site with ads from an ad host, like Google’s AdSense. Aligning your site with a popular search engine such as Google will greatly increase traffic flow.
• Place your own ads on Microsoft’s AdCenter. It’s cheaper than many competitors, and this will drive the traffic you want to your site.

After these three steps, all you have to do is bid for keywords and wait. Users will be drawn to the site, and many of them will also be drawn to the Google ads that have been placed there. The owners of the websites then cash in on the discrepancy between what they paid Microsoft and what Google is paying them. It seems like the perfect plan.

However, some web entrepreneurs have taken the idea a bit too far. In response, Google has been making efforts to block users who design sites for the pure purpose of traffic arbitrage, claiming that this diminishes the user experience. Generally speaking, the pitfalls here are obvious. A site created solely for the purpose of ad propagation is not going to be very popular, with high bounce rates and low return traffic. Users are very easily turned off by sites that offer a seemingly endless stream of clickable ads with little other content. It also seems like a bad business move; after all, the idea is to attract people to your site and keep them interested long enough to click on a select few ads. If the site is nothing but ads, what is there to attract the user?

Still, as is normally the case with a money-making scheme, this idea seems to be growing in popularity with many traffic arbitrage aficionados. As one enthusiastic blogger puts it, “I don’t know about you, but I do not know any businesses where you can make immediate and riskless [sic] profit, other than Traffic Arbitrage.” It certainly seems that, when pursued correctly, this idea certainly seems to work for many people. From all angles, the risks seem extremely low, and the potential payoffs seem almost unbelievable. After all, any venture that can earn yield thousands of dollars per day would be enticing to most people. As long as the web site creator is careful to make sure that the content of their site is not solely dedicated to ad space, it seems as though traffic arbitrage, however morally questionable some may deem it, is a very lucrative venture for up and coming entrepreneurs.

By Michael Gorvin