Bronte Media

Long-time readers know that I don’t like the word arbitrage when used to describe made-for-adsense sites. Publishers take on risk (click-through rates vary from 10-50%, they have no certainty as to the price per click they will be paid etc.), which in my mind, defeats the definition.

One other characteristic of arbitrage is that the opportunity rarely lasts for long. That’s usually because a lot more people see the profit opportunity and whittle away the margin. Well that’s not quite the case here, but Google is effectively shutting off the oxygen of these types of made-for-adsense sites by closing down the publisher’s accounts.

Publishers could try to monetize with other ad networks although I doubt they will have much luck. It takes real balls what Google is doing. They do have a profit incentive in that they probably saw that advertisers were becoming more reticent to turn on content targeting because of the quality of traffic that comes through these types of sites but they still should be commended.