I thought arbitrage was dead?

[Devil Dog]

What's up with toseeka.com and others. It's nothing but arbitrage!

[Seraphim]

What's up with toseeka.com and others. It's nothing but arbitrage!

It only died for small and medium size publishers. For larger portfolio owners like Frank Schilling, Marchex, etc., it continues... and likely always will. I got booted years ago around the 5.4K a day marker. That stung just a little bit.

[Devil Dog]

it only died for small and medium size publishers. For larger portfolio owners like frank schilling, marchex, etc., it continues... And likely always will.

bs

[Seraphim]

bs

Welcome to Google/Yahooland...

[Acro]

It's nothing but arbitrage for large portfolio holders. I don't mean the obvious ones. There are lots of holders that have 10,000 - 25,000 domains. These guys made fortunes in the early days of arbitrage and forged alliances with several PPC providers that now hook them up directly with Y/G. It pays to kiss ass but one day the backflow will come.

[Donny Simonton]

Yeah, I'm not sure how these guys like info.com, toseeka.com, findstuff.com and others make any money. But as long as they are paying us better than somebody else, I'm not going to complain. At the end of the day, money is money! We normally call those sites RON (Run of network) sites, which means you can type anything in and they will still show up.

Internally in many cases I have thought about removing all RON sites, they don't generate a lot of money, but it does add something to the listings. If you only have 2 normal advertisers and 8 RON sites, at least you still fill out the entire page.

Donny

Donny

[Devil Dog]

Yeah, I'm not sure how these guys like info.com, toseeka.com, findstuff.com and others make any money. But as long as they are paying us better than somebody else, I'm not going to complain. At the end of the day, money is money! We normally call those sites RON (Run of network) sites, which means you can type anything in and they will still show up.

Internally in many cases I have thought about removing all RON sites, they don't generate a lot of money, but it does add something to the listings. If you only have 2 normal advertisers and 8 RON sites, at least you still fill out the entire page.

Donny

Donny

But you fill the majority of the page with unrelated crap!

[Donny Simonton]

It just depends on what you are looking for. If you are looking for "fuxxing dog farts", sure we return a bunch of stuff that people are paying for for some reason. But in many cases it's when say yahoo it has 8 advertisers and we backfill with other people. Now understand our backfill is based purely on RPC, nothing else. Is it a perfect system, no, but I would rather show something that nothing. Also understand that we don't even show some of these guys, we are only interested in ones that will pay decently.

Another way of looking at this, is let's say one of these guys wants to pay 2 cents for all traffic no matter where the traffic is. So if today I have 0 advertisers for "Hosting" in China would you rather me show a blank page or show one of these guys and you make 2 cents?

It's just backfill. Everybody does it.

In the next few days and weeks I will be testing out another 5-6 new providers that we use as part of our secondary feed. Some of these will kick out some of the RON sites, but some are more focused outside the US. Most of the RON sites focus on US/CA not much else.

Donny

If you have an example of certain keywords that have a lot of backfill, let me know.

Donny