Last Updated on April 20, 2020
I’ve just found out via JenSense, that Google is disabling arbitrage publisher accounts as of June 1st. There is not official word from Google yet, the buzz started from a WebmasterWorld.com forum thread, in which many AdSense advertisers tell about the termination letters they received. If you don’t know what this arbitrage is, you can read more details at The Search Engine Roundtable. Basically, it means that you buy cheap advertising to expose your MFA site, which shows ads with higher CPC. Personally I don’t know anybody who makes money with arbitrage, but I heard that some people make $70k per month. Of course this is not profit, because they have to pay for their AdWords campaigns, but even if one makes $4-5k per month out of this, it is still a good income.
If you run AdSense on your site, you may have noticed very cheap clicks which we all try to filter out. Now these will disappear and I wonder what is going to happen with the publishers’ income. I would be tempted to say that it will increase, due to the elimination of MFAs. On the other hand, if MFAs represent now a big percentage of the content network publishers, it is possible that on short term we will witness a decrease of publishers’ earnings, followed by a long term increase, as more advertisers will join the network.
What is your opinion on this? Will we earn more from July 1st?
One thing I’m sorry for: I did not have the chance to experience arbitrage. I thought of it for such a long time, I procrastinated every day, and now it’s gone. And I’m not that sorry, I’m quite happy I’ll keep my account so far.
yeah the income these sites have been able to make is insane! arbitragers had to have known this possibility existed.. but what I cannot understand is this: to be able to make that kinda money, your readers – oh wait – your users would have to be clicking like some crazy maniacs. To filter out the MFAs is the only way.. IMHO
Of course, Pearl, the common guy searching for some info on the internet will click on those because he cannot find anything useful on that MFA site and the only possibilities of leaving it are to click an ad or to use the Back browser button. Such people even don’t know they are clicking ads.
right – lets see how it affects the community! I do see a long time benefit to this..
I am guessing Google wants to reduce the number of adsense publishers, since there are so many more compared to the Yahoo network, and the quality of many publishers is not that great.
Now, Yahoo Publisher Network is considered good by many since their pay rate is higher, but as of now, if you are in the U.S. and most of your traffic comes from outside the U.S. , Yahoo considers that traffic to be of “inferior” quality and may disable your Yahoo account. That is one of the reasons I have kept away from using Yahoo ads on my site.
Well, arbitrage is basically having a site just for adsense, where the layout and the content revolve around adsense ads. This could also count sites, I think, where older content is subjected to extra ads, thus reducing the value of such pages in the eyes of adsense advertisors.