Wh is Arbi considered "bad"?
- Thread starter WFNoob
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Arbitrage is clearly bad. It makes you an annoying and unnecessary middleman, and the only person who benefits is you. That said, I'm giving it a try, because if I have to run across annoying arbitrage pages when I'm looking for something to buy I might as well get a piece of the action for myself.
Our kind of arbitrage is not comparable to something like shopping.com. They add value for the user by organizing a tremendous amount of information to help people find what they're looking for more quickly. Our PPC arbitrage generally slows people down -- it's an extra unnecessary step between what they want and where to buy it.
So I don't have any pious delusions that I'm not doing something bad. But it's only a little bad, and if I'm making money, screw it.
Our kind of arbitrage is not comparable to something like shopping.com. They add value for the user by organizing a tremendous amount of information to help people find what they're looking for more quickly. Our PPC arbitrage generally slows people down -- it's an extra unnecessary step between what they want and where to buy it.
So I don't have any pious delusions that I'm not doing something bad. But it's only a little bad, and if I'm making money, screw it.
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=48182 says:
- No Google ad may be placed on any non-content-based pages.
- No Google ad may be placed on pages published specifically for the purpose of showing ads, whether or not the page content is relevant.
So it's likely that some arbi sites are breaking these rules... but that's not to say "arbitrage" as a whole is not allowed. As Graywolf pointed out in his blog recently, About.com is almost pure MFA (Made For AdSense) junk, and yet it gets millions in revenue.
Aribtrage on its own is not a bad thing. In fact, arbitrage is the basis for almost all advertising.(advertise for less than what you will bring back in sales) However, AdSense/YPN arbitrage aka. click flipping is perhaps not really in the best interest of the end user and is perhaps slightly unethical, but then again it only hurts other advertisers if their stuff isn't good enough to convert in the first place. It benefits Google greatly because it provides them with more revenue and it benefits other advertisers because it provides more impressions and potentially more clicks. In the end, AdWords->AdSense arbitrage on a large scale can make a poor user experience, but Google could easily fix that by not allowing AdSense or YPN on landing pages and they don't seem to mind that too much so I guess it's not that bad after all.
Well I don't let them because all my traffic I want on my arbi pages is targeted and plus you never know what kind of DP rats are searching google to report MFA sites.
This rule has always been way too subjective in my opinion. Who's to say that a site was or wasn't built to put Google ad code on? You could technically say that any content site was built to place ads on. It's a bullshit rule that Google pulled right out of their ass for the purposes of covering it I think.
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