Cheers

[...] company blames overall economic conditions, increasing transparency of PPC advertising, and the collapse of advertising arbitrage for the drop in domain revenue. Below is an excerpt from its report (emphasis added): Industry [...]

This cheering about how easy or better it will be for the business models that are not affected (like so called natural traffic), it’s gross. Think about it. “I will do better because the ’system’ eliminated the competition.” Is that what anyone really wants?

One comment was to the effect of “run a real business”. Arbitrage is a real business, and a complex one that carries significant risk. Another suggested it’s good for ‘real advertisers’. Well, any so called ‘real advertiser’ could have got the same traffic I got if they took a minute to figure it out.

Is the traffic so terribly terrible? Probably not, if it’s first tier stuff, recycled once. Imagine the conversions if I was actually trying to sell a stupid ringtone with my bottom fishing clicks. But, the ‘potential’ customer that I fish up and still wants to swim – now that’s potential!

And then there’s branding. Do you think anyone has ever clicked on a billboard on the side of a highway and had a burger appear on their lap? Uhhh, no. It’s a pre-sell – a primer – a “hay I need that” call. No arbitrage is like taking away billboards because they suck at customer relations.

Anyway, it was fun, it was profitable, and I sincerely morn the loss of capitalism to big business-alism.

Cheers!
Mike

Good for people that run an actual business. Meaning now you will not have to compete with 3 or 4 other arbitrage websites in the same category. This will acutally reduce the cost for a real business that uses yahoo for marketing, you will have less competition. It sometimes gets ridculous when you have the same add going to one network then to another then to another. Abuse has finally lead to restriction “sad but true”. Bad for people that depend on that money for a living. CPA will start to lead the way. I would rather pay for a 50.00 acutal lead than spend 200.00 through horrbile clicks to get that lead. Market will become more efficient. Websites like surehits.com and brokersweb.com will keep springing up. Other category sites will start emerge.

My prediction.
MSN will raise bid to 38.00 or so and newscorp and some other outfit will be the pawns to make msn raise the bid.

Bad for