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A method I found that is giving me 200-300% ROI - Buying and Selling Traffic (13)

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For the past 6 months I have been running CPA offers on POP with little success. I had some profit days but for the most part I was steadily in the red. I came across some content online and found that this guy was buying traffic from one source and selling it to another using only a 2 page Lander and running in the adult vertical. No CPA offers (although they could be used).

I tested this method by setting up my own page with some adult images and adding some banner ads (traffic i'm selling). I started this on Monday and ended the day with an ROI of about -30%. With this initial test I was able to spot some good placements so I prepared a few more campaigns for Tuesday. Tuesday I did $25 profit and today I'm doing about $40 profit so far.


I think that this could be scaled to some pretty big numbers but I wanted to clear the air on a few things before I continue on this journey. I am new to Adult and am already fearing that my traffic quality will be low and or that I will get into legal issues if I'm running copied images on my lander.


1. Does anyone have experience buying pop traffic and running only banners as monetization on their landers?

2. What do I need to do to stay compliant with the network I am selling traffic to (through their banner ads)?

3. How can I make sure that I am not going to use images that will get me in trouble, if I can't copy them from other sites, where is a good place to get amateur pics that look natural?


I see a lot of potential so far but haven't ran this long enough to know. However, 1 GEO is giving me about 200-300% ROI and is generating me the most revenue right now. The revenue per thousand impressions in this geo are extremely high. My biggest concern is that the RPM (revenue per mili) will decline rapidly if my quality doesn't meet expectations even though I am running mainly only 3G traffic.

Overall my campaign has done $70+ in revenue and around $40 in profit today.

Any help/guide with this venture would be very appreciated.Making $40 profit today is very motivating and is the most I've made in 1 day. I feel like I can scale this to $200-300/day profit very quickly, if not more with the right approach.

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If you're simply buying pop traffic and popping a page full of garbage ads I doubt you will last long in this industry.

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Thanks for the encouragement. The page isn't full of ads, I'm generating most of the revenue from 1 mobile banner and 1 native ad at the top of the page. I would like to make a better quality page that will have some longer term success, hence why I'm asking for advice/help on this subject.

Ultimately, I would like to generate some profits from this campaign to increase my budget to test other things like native or facebook. However I'm just trying to run with what appears to be making money? More than I've been able to do running cpa offers through ripped landers over the past few months (although this method obviously works).

My page is simply a gallery, nothing more. Except the top of the page has 1 banner ad and 1 native ad. No popups/redirects coming from my lander. 75% of revenue is coming from the banner ad, the other 25% coming from the native ad.

Any real advice is appreciated.

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This is called Traffic Arbitrage - you're taking advantage of the price differences by buying low and selling high. Based on my conversations with traffic network reps, there are people making insane amounts of money using this model.

The main concern, as you've pointed out, is whether the network you're selling the traffic to is OK with the traffic quality, and whether or not they accept arbitraged traffic. I believe there are ways to guard against being found out that you're doing arbitrage, but traffic quality can't be cloaked.

You can find out more on this topic by googling "traffic arbitrage". I haven't done it myself so will stop here.


As for using copyrighted images - if you ask openly about this, you will get a diplomatic answer, because nobody can tell you it's OK or safe to do so, or that you'll never be sued. In reality though, most affiliates are just using any images they can get from anywhere, without much consideration for copyright. Matuloo touched on this topic in his post:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...s-2017-edition

And yes, people DO get sued occasionally:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...0-for-doing-am

There are places where you can find royalty-free or stock images, but the availability/options are limited:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...t-stock-images

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...t-stock-photos

So ultimately, you'll need to make the personal decision of whether you want to take the risk in exchange for higher ROI or not.




Amy

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Speaking of getting sued - There are businesses who's entire business model is Suing people using photographs - They post content, hoping that it will get infringed and then sue the F**k out of that person. Plenty of affiliates running ads have been sued -

I'd be more worried if i ran my ads in US, CA, Uk etc.

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Arbitrage with pop traffic will be super hard to scale, the advertisers will recognise high bounce rate and low quality so , the bid you are getting for the banners and Native placements will eventually decrease...
For doing it in high scale, you will need to bring high quality traffic and many good advertisers (big SSP's) which is not that easy as it sounds

Re images, you can embed Instagram and give the proper credit but as Amy mentioned, copy rights issues are dangerous so make sure you are using only "fair use" images.

Good luck & keep us updated!

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With regards to images.. Sign up to Flickr and search for images which you can use for commercial purposes using the filters.

Keep a list of urls where you got the images from in case you end up getting sued.

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Many people are running arbitrage like this and in many cases the networks don't really mind ... after all, this is a bidding world where people can block non-performing placements. However, some networks have quality requirements, and they refuse some sites from running ads ... so as someone already pointed out, you can't just throw up a page full of ads and hope for it to fly. Especially with higher volumes, the network will manually check your site after certain volume level is crossed and they might ask questions about how you acquired the traffic. Some will be ok with buying it, as it's quite common in the adult world to buy feeder traffic.

Your main problem will be the low quality traffic, so advertisers will eventually start blocking your placements and the EPCMs will go down. The common thing to do when that happens, is to setup the same on a different domain ...

As for the images, a great way of handling this and to stay out of trouble is to use material from paysites and link back to them (in a wise way, do no use full sets of pics or full videos of course). You can also directly join their affiliate programs and they will give you access to all the promo content you need.

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Wow thank you guys for the solid advice. It's good to know there are other affiliates successfully running this model.

I completely understand about the EPCM coming down if traffic quality is poor, that was one of my concerns.

I am also staying in touch with the networks so that I have some communication/understanding of their traffic requirements. I've come to realize that building relationships in this business is very important.

Another day in the green on this campaign at $45 profit with 8 hours in the day left. I'll be running some more tests over the next few days and will hopefully open up some new opportunities.

Thanks again everyone and I'll try to give an update soon

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Looks like you have found some nice arbitrage opportunity there.

Make sure networks are okay with it as you can easily lose all of your earnings and whole account.

All this AM industry is about traffic arbitrage, some of us send traffic to offers, some find "loopholes" like you

In the past many people did similar things with Google Adsense (not a good idea at all) or native ads and viral sites.

Another example (this one I tested myself) was to resell remnant or back button traffic back to networks, it made some extra $.

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How exactly should I ask the network if they are okay with me buying the traffic that I'm selling through their banners?

Makes me nervous, but obviously want to be upfront so I can sleep at night. I've been in communication with my traffic network Manager on Skype and they are offering me alot of 3G and Wifi traffic for a very good CPM rate (tier 1 traffic). So we shall see

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Ask them if they are ok with having their ads on pages that you are sending feeder/bought traffic to. I would present it as it's NOT the only method of getting traffic to that page

A LOT of sites that run network ads are doing this, but it's usually just a supplemental source of traffic, not the only one.

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As Matej recommends, sounds as a good way.

You don't have to tell them, you are doing arbitrage ;-)

Let them approve those pages with ads first.

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