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Inside The World Of Ad Arbitrage: An Analysis Of 272,220 Taboola Ads
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Inside The World Of Ad Arbitrage: An Analysis Of 272,220 Taboola Ads

Based on my sample, arbitrage ads appear to comprise the largest portion of Taboola’s advertising. In line with this discovery, this article will focus on types of arbitrage, who is behind arbitrage sites, problems with arbitrage, and solutions.

In later articles, I will review the additional aspects of arbitrage, non-arbitrage advertising categories, and business opportunities that Taboola ads present for media sites. If you've been forwarded this email,  subscribe to my newsletter to receive these articles.

The Five Types Of Arbitrage on Taboola

Based on my survey, around 50% of all Taboola ads are likely purchased specifically for arbitrage. Arbitrage occurs when companies buy ads on other websites in order to make money from ads or affiliate links on their own websites. This finding should not be surprising to anyone who has clicked on a few Taboola ads and landed on a page of ads with a small article unit. It has also been covered previously. However, the high number of these ads in my sample demonstrates the sheer quantity of people doing this.

The image below shows an example collection of Taboola ads. Notice that three of the six ads are arbitrage: “Parents Who Got the Last Laugh,” “Early Signs and Treatments For Diabetic Nerve Pain,” and “19 Discounts Seniors Get Only If They Know.”

In this article, I will review five main types of ad arbitrage:

1) Slideshow Arbitrage: content, such as slideshows, that is solely focused on obtaining as many ad impressions as possible. On mobile, these ads are often converted into ad-filled listicles.

2) Direct Arbitrage: pages that are filled only with ads or links to other pages with ads.

3) Affiliate Arbitrage: pages that are filled with affiliate links or deliver users to affiliate links (such as an ad that links to “Top 10 Delivery Links”).

4) Search Engine Arbitrage: a search engine results page (such as an ad that links to “Track A Vehicle With GPS Search”) or a search engine homepage (such as an ad that links to TripsShop)

5) Ad Campaign Arbitrage: an ad campaign from a mainstream media site that likely needs to meet a traffic target (such as an ad that links CNN’s More To Incredible India campaign)

Slideshow Arbitrage

The slideshow arbitrage process generally works as follows:

1) You read an article on a popular news site

2) At the bottom of the article, you encounter a link to a slideshow. It could be titled something such as “These Twins Were Named ‘Most Beautiful In The World,’ Wait Till You See Them Today,” with an image like the one below:

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/j5-e8ySZDF7QdJD6PA_tGrnnpvLcEvh6tqbJauIvzDx-kCCv__CdVEw0AMEBx9k392CEHbuYkAKdmHTv34HAH_nndUv6FhwE8S8h9BBiE0BZQhXvhpJHoiZqBLm7ySQPGlm3soKU

3) You click. While that click initially costs the advertiser money, perhaps you continue to click through 50 different pages of the slideshow, each of which contains five Google ad units and sometimes Taboola ad units. Eventually, you may land on a page that is entirely filled with Taboola ads. After all of your clicking, the website has profited from the transaction.

Direct Arbitrage

Direct arbitrage happens when sites link directly to a page filled with ads or a page with list of links that each link to a page filled with ads.

For example, one Taboola ad that I came across in my survey linked to this SavingHub page filed with ads:

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/5A63SSNl1n6UViALsUg_toE3ovoJvR9rOdzFE5KRuiq-yZHRZjEva8UCBdIlsPO3YmbWWVG0fpMGHfOvqjAdgaotj4ETq4Azfzxf0OhCC1VDHjS9gAKCAGSqVnOcbFeFs5fSn498

 

Here’s a website with a page of links, each of which link to a page of ads.

The sites listed below take a direct arbitrage approach:

Brand

Impressions

URL

SUV  | Sponsored Links

926

http://inasuvok.haus/

Cancellation Holidays | Sponsored Links

473

http://savinghub.net/

Health.Online / Psoriasis

418

https://www.health.online/topic/23/psoriasis

Luxury Cars | Sponsored Links

360

http://www.lifestyledaily.com/


Affiliate Arbitrage

Affiliate arbitrage happens when the cost of sending a user to a page filled with a list of affiliate links is less than the cost of the ads. An example of affiliate arbitrage is a Taboola ad that linked to this “Top 10 Best Dating Sites” page.

Similar to sites like The New York Times owned The WireCutter , these sites make money by sending people to purchase something with an affiliate link and taking a cut of the revenue.  Affiliate arbitrage is not necessarily problematic if the website employing it is able to add significant value, beyond providing a list of affiliate links.

The following table lists some of the top affiliate arbitrage sites:
 

Brand

Impressions

Url

TOP UK Dating Sites

1650

https://www.top10bestdatingsites.co.uk

MyFinance Bank Referrals

1003

https://www.myfinance.com/best-savings-accounts/

Compare VoIP Systems Quotes

658

http://info.expertmarket.com/racing-to-get-new-phone-system?cid=57a9b5a931da4&utm_source=taboola&utm_medium=msn-msn&utm_term=New+York+Companies+Discover+This+Landline+Trick&utm_content=https%3A%2F%2Fconsole.brax-cdn.com%2Fcreatives%2F44dd7285-cd6a-4a0f-9085-8137587509a3%2FTS_3_e99eb939ffec9ee3dadb327a52e3fafd.600x500.png&utm_campaign=TS_US_D

Top US Dating Sites

393

https://www.top10bestdatingsites.com

Mind The Bet

305

http://casino.mindthebet.co.uk

Clinic Compare Quotes

166

http://lasereye.cliniccompare.co.uk/brilliant-eye-treatments-for-over-60s?cid=592300e4c0c93&utm_source=taboola&utm_medium=msn-msn&utm_term=Born+Before+1957%3F+You%27re+Eligible+For+Revolutionary+New+Laser+Eye+Surgery&utm_content=https%3A%2F%2Fconsole.brax-cdn.com%2Fcreatives%2F44dd7285-cd6a-4a0f-9085-8137587509a3%2FSci_fi_eye_1200_flipped_b2678d6c4a35b734bc6e8b492dfeb3bd.600x500.png&utm_campaign=Laser_Over_60s_D

Top 10 Best Meal Delivery

145

https://www.top10bestmealdelivery.com

CompareCards By LendingTree

95

http://www.comparecards.com

 

Search Engine Arbitrage

Search engine arbitrage, long the “bread and butter” of Ask.com, is the practice of linking to search engine results pages using an ad from another site. Ken Van Every, the Director of Programmatic Ads and Data Sales at Cars.com, suggested to me that this type of arbitrage may be driven in part by websites buying ads to search engine results pages in order to make their organic traffic appear larger than it actually is. 

Brand

Impressions                  

URL

Meal Delivery | Sponsored Links

22

https://search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?hspart=yahoo&hsimp=yhs-qo2&p=organic+meal+delivery+New+York

Yahoo Search

14

https://search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?hspart=yahoo&hsimp=yhs-qo23&p=top+treatments+for+diabetic+nerve+pain&type=34105014

Yahoo Search | GPS Tracking

9

https://search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?hspart=yahoo&hsimp=yhs-qo11&p=track+a+vehicle+with+gps&type=42439903

Luxury Sedans | Sponsored Links

3

https://search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?hspart=yahoo&hsimp=yhs-qo11&p=New+York+deals+on+new+luxury+sedans&type=34179062

 

Ad Campaign Arbitrage  

Ad campaign arbitrage generally occurs when a website, often a mainstream media site, purchases external traffic to meet their ad campaign numbers 

Brand

Impressions                                                      

Url

CNN for Be Brasil

418

http://advertisementfeature.cnn.com/2017/apex/

CNN International for Incredible India

238

http://advertisementfeature.cnn.com/2018/more-to-incredible-india/

CNN International for Guizhou Green Corridor

136

http://advertisementfeature.cnn.com/2018/guizhou/china-green-corridor/

CNBC International for BOI Thailand

108

https://www.cnbc.com/advertorial/2018/06/18/how-thailand-is-bringing-technology-to-the-table.html

Who Is Behind These Arbitrage Sites?

Most arbitrage websites are opaque when it comes to providing any information about their ownership. They tend to be fairly cookie-cutter WordPress blogs and do not provide any identifying information.

 One firm that is transparent about owning a number of arbitrage websites is Hive Media. On its company website, Hive Media claims to manage “400+ million pageviews every month” and to “adapt article and ad stack layouts to provide a highly-engaging user experience.” In my survey, I found ads from seven different websites owned by Hive Media: Idolator (long ago owned by Gawker), Give It Love, Trendchaser, PastFactory, Hooch, PostFun, and BuzzNet.

Hive Media’s Careers page, which has open positions for both a digital media buyer and slideshow creators, indicates that arbitrage is a major and growing part of its business. For example, the position description for “Freelance Content / Slideshow Creator” is as follows:https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/gvHuWCjr_06OOFf5anHfSRA9Bd0gcMxjMh3e4i09P1NPH4GAs30b0JmWQz7SJaZ-F92UV8WLUKm0_JaiH9KlU2cl_vVrZ4om9Zt9RzyJFikcuVfBLretqp2Xcmk1u1AWetPVa0Rp

Ad Beat, a competitive intelligence tool for advertising, ranked Hive Media’s Trend Chaser as the #1 advertiser in the Art & Entertainment/Entertainment News & Gossip category and the 64th largest advertiser overall in ads seen in the last 30 days. Trend Chaser’s articles typically consist of long slideshows, such as this 64-page article on “Youngest Female Billionaires.”

Another major arbitrage site that has emerged in the past few years is Topix Stars, which originally hosted local community forums. Topix Stars is part of Topix and its major stakeholders include legacy media giants McClatchy, Gannett, and Tribune Publishing Co. According to AdBeat, Topix Stars is the #4 advertiser in the Art & Entertainment/Entertainment News & Gossip category and the 93rd largest overall in ads seen in the last 30 days. One example of a Topix article is “17 Stars Who Chose Adoption For Their Children,” which includes 113 slides and showed up 5,450 times during my survey. As noted by Van Every, Topix likely targets their ads to distinct URLs TopixStars.com and TopOffbeat.com to avoid having their main domain Topix.com blacklisted.

Problems with Arbitrage

On the internet, as in the world more generally, when there is a way for people to make easy money, crowds will flock to it. After all, if everyone is making money from doing a certain thing, what could be the problem with it?

Unfortunately, arbitrage presents several problems:

  1. Arbitrageurs pollute the internet with junk content and bad ad impressions

Writer time is spent creating derivative content, solely designed to generate ad impressions. Meanwhile, brands that are concerned about where their ads will appear are forced to spend time and resources identifying arbitrage sites and playing whack-a-mole with blacklists. Further, these sites don’t have editorial standards of most legitimate publishers. For an example of the negative repercussions of Taboola ads, see Gimlet Media’s podcast “An Ad for the Worst Day of Your Life.”

  1. Arbitrageurs who are promoted by legitimate media sites likely end up reducing the revenue for these sites  

As the ads displayed increase, cost per thousand (CPM) for each ad tends to fall. Because the business model of ad arbitrage sites requires them to display more ads than they purchase, these sites reduce overall revenues for non-arbitrage sites. As such, eliminating or restricting arbitrage sites would increase revenue for legitimate sites, especially now that Taboola is not guaranteeing payment for using its ad module and the price of ads is determined by the market. While brands that advertise with Taboola may appreciate the lower CPM, they do not appreciate advertising on junk sites and end up paying to maintain large blacklists of junk sites.

What To Do

One possible solution to these issues would be to ban ads from the landing pages for Taboola ads, as Van Every proposed on AdExchanger. As Van Every notes, banning these ads would essentially destroy arbitrage sites and reduce the supply of ads. This would, in turn, raise the CPM for non-arbitrage sites that display ads.

Another solution would be for all major legitimate media publishers to create a blacklist of arbitrage sites and ban them from promoting content on their domains.  This would also likely eliminate arbitrage sites and raise the CPM for non-arbitrage publishers.

Currently, ad networks like Taboola and arbitrageurs are incentivized to continue their practices. In order to make the proposed solutions possible, legitimate publishers and brands, who spend time blacklisting arbitrage sites, need to work together. Given that blacklisting arbitrage sites is, as Van Every describes, in “[the legitimate publishers] best interest from a long term revenue standpoint”, this option just needs more awareness from mainstream publishers.

Arbitrage Outside Taboola

Many of these sites not only use Taboola for arbitrage, but also use other content discovery networks like RevContent and other ad networks like Facebook. For example, you can see lots of Facebook ads aiming for arbitrage on the following pages:

https://www.facebook.com/pg/BoredomTherapy/ads/?ref=page_internal

https://www.facebook.com/pg/pastfactory/ads

https://www.facebook.com/pg/HistoryDailyPage/ads/?ref=page_internal

https://www.facebook.com/ninjajournalist/ads

https://www.facebook.com/pg/Trading-Blvd-1817165215251080/ads/?ref=page_internal

https://www.facebook.com/pg/PostFun/ads

https://www.facebook.com/WeightLossGroove/ads

https://www.facebook.com/pg/AutoVersed/ads

That being said, Facebook is nowhere near as dependent on arbitrage for ads relative to content discovery networks and arbitrage likely makes up a much smaller portion of their ads.

Table Of Arbitrage Sites

Below is a table of various arbitrage sites, most of which use slideshow arbitrage, the most common form of arbitrage.  

If you’ve been forwarded this email, subscribe to my newsletter to receive upcoming articles about the additional aspects of arbitrage, non-arbitrage advertising categories, and business opportunities that Taboola ads present for media sites.

 

Name

Impressions               

URL

Idolator & TrendChaser

6460

http://www.trend-chaser.com

Bored Articles

5472

http://boredarticles.com

Topix Stars

5456

https://www.topixstars.com

IcePop

4038

http://www.icepop.com

Miss Penny Stocks

4013

http://misspennystocks.com

Give It Love

3913

http://www.giveitlove.com

fannntastic-woman

3701

https://4-family.com

Groovy History

3602

http://groovyhistory.com

InvestmentGuru

3315

http://investmentguru.com

SportsRetriever

2097

http://dj5iwuva.sportsretriever.com

Activly.com

2010

http://activly.com

Expert Market

1988

http://info.expertmarket.com

BleuBloom.com

1958

http://bleubloom.com

Yahoo Search | GPS Tracking

1956

http://ylnk.io

Womens24x7

1939

http://womens24x7.com

TieBreaker

1810

http://www.tiebreaker.com

MoneyWise

1787

https://moneywise.com

Refinance Gold

1726

http://refinancegold.com

Work + Money

1695

https://www.workandmoney.com

Travelfuntu

1588

http://rwu51l9u.travelfuntu.com

The Brofessional

1575

http://www.thebrofessional.net

Money Versed

1511

http://moneyversed.com

Activly

1469

http://activly.com

KiwiReport

1312

http://cajpjhuft.kiwireport.com

Topexpensive.com

1225

http://www.topexpensive.com

Boredom Therapy

1197

http://boredomtherapy.com

PastFactory

1076

http://www.pastfactory.com

Worldemand

986

http://www.worldemand.com

Journalistate

941

http://www.journalistate.com

SUV | Sponsored Links

926

http://www.lifestyledaily.com

SimpleMost

867

http://simplemost.com

Graduatez

841

http://www.graduatez.com

DirectExpose

821

http://www.directexpose.com

FunnyAnd

761

http://funnyand.com

BridesBlush

761

http://70ckkfdk.bridesblush.com

Relocation Target

717

http://www.relocationtarget.com

WeightLossGroove

671

http://weightlossgroove.com

Yahoo Search

668

http://ylnk.io

WomensArticle.com

652

http://www.womensarticle.com

NewsD

652

http://y.newsd.co

DomesticatedCompanion

652

http://www.domesticatedcompanion.com

12Facts.com

608

https://www.12facts.com

EternalLifeStyle

592

http://2esxnqqi.eternallifestyle.com

HowStuffWorks

579

https://learn.howstuffworks.com http://quizzes.howstuffworks.com

Drivepedia

539

http://l0127zj6.drivepedia.com

Definition

518

https://def.sptrkr.com

Noteabley

487

http://i2yjobzx.noteabley.com

Cosmo Womens

483

http://cosmowomens.com

BlitzLift

478

http://blitzlift.com

Healthy George

458

http://healthygeorge.com

History Daily

428

http://historydaily.org

WomensArticle.com

419

http://www.womensarticle.com

Health.Online / Psoriasis

418

http://www.health.online/topic/23/psoriasis

CNN for Be Brasil

418

http://advertisementfeature.cnn.com/2017/apex/

World Lifestyle

367

https://www.worldlifestyle.com

Nation | Sponsored Links

361

http://www.nation.com

Luxury Cars | Sponsored Links

359

http://www.lifestyledaily.com

Sky-Elite-News

329

http://skyelitenews.com

Mieux Exister

324

http://mieuxexister.com

SportsChew

322

http://sportschew.com

Forbes

307

http://www3.forbes.com

Greeningz

301

http://hcrdtuzft.greeningz.com

Hooch

293

http://www.hooch.net

Haaretz

287

https://www.haaretz.com

It Is The Vibe

267

http://www.itisthevibe.com

www.bleubloom.com

266

http://bleubloom.com

PastFactoryqq

266

http://www.pastfactory.com/

Drhealth

253

http://drhealthmag.com

NinjaJournalist

246

http://www.ninjajournalist.com/

CNN International for Incredible India

238

http://advertisementfeature.cnn.com/2018/more-to-incredible-india/

Afrizap

229

http://www.afrizap.com/en/

Funny And

220

http://funnyand.com

TummyTuckHipo

212

http://tummytuckhipo.com

Trading Blvd

210

http://tradingblvd.com/

LockerRoomVIP

207

http://www.lockerroomvip.com/

DailyChoices

206

http://www.daily-choices.com

The Jakarta Post

205

http://www.thejakartapost.com

WorldTravelling

201

http://5v7bhl9i.worldtravelling.com

HistoryInOrbit.com

197

http://www.historyinorbit.com

HealthCentral.com

192

https://www.healthcentral.com

CNET

180

http://www.cnet.com

healthyandpretty

170

http://healthyandpretty.com

Sofeminine

169

https://www.sofeminine.co.uk/

Factinate

161

https://www.factinate.com

Government Fleet

153

https://www.government-fleet.com

Improve Budget

152

https://improvebudget.com

PostFun

143

http://www.postfun.com/

LifeDaily.com

141

http://www.lifedaily.com

CNN International for Guizhou Green Corridor

136

http://advertisementfeature.cnn.com/2018/guizhou/china-green-corridor/

Women's Article

127

https://www.womensarticle.com/

Lonny

126

http://www.lonny.com

HealthyPanda.net

122

HealthyPanda.net

Fallbrook247.com

110

https://fallbrook247.com

CNBC International for BOI Thailand

108

https://www.cnbc.com/advertorial/2018/06/18/how-thailand-is-bringing-technology-to-the-table.html

Top Family Mag

104

http://topfamilymag.com

LoanPride

102

http://loanpride.com

Fallbrook24/7

101

https://fallbrook247.com

BuzznFun

94

http://www.buzznfun.com

Topixoffbeat

92

http://topixoffbeat.com

Autoversed

78

https://autoversed.com/

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