PPC Arbitrage with domainer parking services and Yahoo/Google domainer feeds are still alive and kicking in spite of what everyone is reporting or saying.
But when news like this breaks, I always think of the saying "things aren't always as they appear", and this is a classic example.
I can assure you, Yahoo has not stopped arbitrage. They may have cut off a few of their majority traffic arbitrage partners, but there weren't all that many to begin with, not to mention, most of them fell under their standard feed anyhow, so it's not a big deal. Yahoo's standard feed is actually the one they dub as the premium feed that you can apply for on their YSM corporate site. You know, the minimum 20 million impressions and 2 million searches per month deal. Well, the payout isn't all that great, so don't even bother applying unless you have a good biz connection on the inside or you have a pal that has a parking service or good street cred that can get you hooked up.
The guys who have the premium (the real premium feed pays out in the 70% zone. Most tier 2 engines and the larger domain parking companies) and suped up premium feed (I just call it this because they don't have a real name for it. It pays out in the 80%-90% zone. Companies like Verisign, Ask, etc.) all filter the shit out of their traffic to begin with, so arbitraged or not, Yahoo has always had a pretty damn high grade of traffic from these guys, and the news didn't really effect them or their earnings all that much.
Of course it's WAY more profitable to be a premium and suped up feed owner, but you can still do full scale ppc arbitrage with most of the domain parking places, just so long as you clean up the sources and route them correctly. Also, instead of being lazy about it, I'd recommend you pay some attention to filtering out bots, proxies, and geo-ip bans from the typical shitty countries. You can automate all of this through a script or two, and by going this route, you can continue your arbitraging operations as it was before, hell, you'd probably make more than before too.
The absolute dumbest thing though is for anyone to buy from a Tier 1 (AdWords, Adsense, MSN, YPN/YSM) nowadays and arbitrage it through any parking service, because then you're just asking to get kicked. Just because the Tier 1's have some crazy fucking tracking setup, so they know a hell of a lot more about it's origin than you think. Arbitraging from Tier 1's can also get costly, but on top of that, it's kind of like a slap in their face when you buy from their content network and sorta sell it back to them.
Overall, stay as far off the radar as you can. You want to come off as squeaky clean as possible. Don't just target mesothelioma or pharma. Spread out the traffic sources and niches. Don't ONLY send US/Canada, mix it up and send at least 10% UK, DE, AUS, FR, etc. If you find a reeeeally cheap traffic source that has shady ways of delivering traffic (spyware/adware, email spam, botnets) it's probably a good idea to stay the hell away in the first place. Lastly, show the parking companies that you use ClickFraud tracking of some sort, and they'll not just accept you and your traffic, but they'll probably give you a bump up in revenue points.
Since we do this ourselves, and we don't want to kill this revenue stream I kept everything fairly general. But I would also suggest that if you do this stuff on your own, keep your mouth shut on other forums and blogs, because "loose lips sink ships" if ya catch my drift.
But when news like this breaks, I always think of the saying "things aren't always as they appear", and this is a classic example.
I can assure you, Yahoo has not stopped arbitrage. They may have cut off a few of their majority traffic arbitrage partners, but there weren't all that many to begin with, not to mention, most of them fell under their standard feed anyhow, so it's not a big deal. Yahoo's standard feed is actually the one they dub as the premium feed that you can apply for on their YSM corporate site. You know, the minimum 20 million impressions and 2 million searches per month deal. Well, the payout isn't all that great, so don't even bother applying unless you have a good biz connection on the inside or you have a pal that has a parking service or good street cred that can get you hooked up.
The guys who have the premium (the real premium feed pays out in the 70% zone. Most tier 2 engines and the larger domain parking companies) and suped up premium feed (I just call it this because they don't have a real name for it. It pays out in the 80%-90% zone. Companies like Verisign, Ask, etc.) all filter the shit out of their traffic to begin with, so arbitraged or not, Yahoo has always had a pretty damn high grade of traffic from these guys, and the news didn't really effect them or their earnings all that much.
Of course it's WAY more profitable to be a premium and suped up feed owner, but you can still do full scale ppc arbitrage with most of the domain parking places, just so long as you clean up the sources and route them correctly. Also, instead of being lazy about it, I'd recommend you pay some attention to filtering out bots, proxies, and geo-ip bans from the typical shitty countries. You can automate all of this through a script or two, and by going this route, you can continue your arbitraging operations as it was before, hell, you'd probably make more than before too.
The absolute dumbest thing though is for anyone to buy from a Tier 1 (AdWords, Adsense, MSN, YPN/YSM) nowadays and arbitrage it through any parking service, because then you're just asking to get kicked. Just because the Tier 1's have some crazy fucking tracking setup, so they know a hell of a lot more about it's origin than you think. Arbitraging from Tier 1's can also get costly, but on top of that, it's kind of like a slap in their face when you buy from their content network and sorta sell it back to them.
Overall, stay as far off the radar as you can. You want to come off as squeaky clean as possible. Don't just target mesothelioma or pharma. Spread out the traffic sources and niches. Don't ONLY send US/Canada, mix it up and send at least 10% UK, DE, AUS, FR, etc. If you find a reeeeally cheap traffic source that has shady ways of delivering traffic (spyware/adware, email spam, botnets) it's probably a good idea to stay the hell away in the first place. Lastly, show the parking companies that you use ClickFraud tracking of some sort, and they'll not just accept you and your traffic, but they'll probably give you a bump up in revenue points.
Since we do this ourselves, and we don't want to kill this revenue stream I kept everything fairly general. But I would also suggest that if you do this stuff on your own, keep your mouth shut on other forums and blogs, because "loose lips sink ships" if ya catch my drift.
. I love parked.com. There are so many options, you can move around so easily, yummy.