Online advertising arbitrage
Online ad services like
Yahoo! Search Marketing and
Google Adwords allow you to purchase online advertisements which cost you an agreed upon cost per click. These are known as PPC (Pay Per Click) ads. Some ad clicks will cost advertisers $0.01 while some can cost well over $10 depending on the keywords that were associated with the ad. Yahoo and
Google both have programs which allow web publishers (aka owners of websites) to place ads on their own websites to make money. Some webmasters will make a website associated with a high paying keyword(s) and place PPC ads on it. Then, they will purchase low cost ads on Yahoo and Google for their websites. The end effect is traffic arbitrage. Low cost traffic is redirected towards pages which contain high paying links. Enough money is made from clicks to cover the traffic cost and turn a profit.
This is not arbitrage as defined above. The owner of the website is simply betting that the income from the
affiliate marketing organisation is more than the cost of bringing visitors to the site. The website owner must pay the
search engine for each visitor to the website but payment from the affliliate only occurs if the visitor actually clicks onto one of the affiliate advertisements. A classic example might be where each visitor to the site costs the site owner 10 cents but an affiliate marketer will pay the website owner 10 dollars if that visitor clicks through to the target website. In this case if more than 1 in 100 visitors click through then the site makes a profit; and conversely if less than 1 in 100 click through then the site makes a loss. The same theory holds true if the affiliate is the same (or another) search engine.