What's Going On Here? (14)
So, I'm doing some manual spying at the moment and came across these block of ads:
After I clicked that ad I'm redirected to this page that also has some RevContent ads. Did this publisher/website owner decide to put RevContent ads onto his own site? By doing this, they're gaining traffic on their website and getting paid by RevContent to publish advertising content on their site? When I click the slideshow, it's like a never ending trail of news story about animals and different types of ads would show on the bottom.
Originally Posted by stungads
After I clicked that ad I'm redirected to this page that also has some RevContent ads. Did this publisher/website owner decide to put RevContent ads onto his own site? By doing this, they're gaining traffic on their website and getting paid by RevContent to publish advertising content on their site? When I click the slideshow, it's like a never ending trail of news story about animals and different types of ads would show on the bottom.
It's called 'Content Arb'
It's probably the most common thing on natives actually...
You have a clickbaity headline and buy a click for say 5 cents... then you make money via the ad revenue for the widgets all over the page, and if the person makes it to, say, the sixth slide, you break even, and anything after that is profit.
Bit of a logistical onus to get it all set up so I think that's why most beginning internet marketers go with Affiliate stuff first...
Great model though...
Back in the day people would arbitrage different native networks against each other - so for instance buy cheap clicks on Taboola to a slideshow you monetize with Revcontent- but at a certain point most of the networks stipulated that you had to be running their ads on the slideshow rather than a competitor.
I think the biggest money-makers though on those are the Google Adsense ads though rather than the native widgets, which most of the networks seem okay with.
Ah got it, I've heard that phrase being thrown around in the forums. People who create these pages might have a good size of content writing teams as I could see how a solo affiliate could be bogged by writing multiple articles at once.
Originally Posted by stungads
Type 1: just transcription youtube viral curiosity videos into written articles or maybe even copying from various sites article pieces than to come up with a complete one.
Type 2: The more serious ones, that have a real content writing team and are well prepared by registering their websites with an actual intellectual property license in order to be able to protect their work.
Type 1 usually runs small scale content arbitrage, with one or two traffic sources, while type 2 run various ad network publisher widgets by monetizing native, interstitial, banner and even video ads. Obviously this last one requires a more complex setup involving various platforms but can generate higher and more stable revenues to justify the upfront cost.
Originally Posted by twinaxe
could be a combo of per click for the native widgets plus cpm for the display + adsense + other for the video, interstitial, pop, etc. It's all a little over my head honestly, I don't have any experience with that side of things (at least not yet
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Originally Posted by platinum
Some of them make surprisingly good sites to run ads on too... I used to LOVE RoutineJournal on Revcontent... I would literally test every offer on it + National Weather Agency for awhile, just those two sites... since they were so good and had so much volume comparatively...
Originally Posted by twinaxe
Just to add to this ... it really takes off when you manage to produce content with "going-viral" potential. Buying cheap traffic is just the headstart, when it starts to spread on it's own, that's when the money starts to roll in. And if you manage to rank these sites in google, that's even better... more free traffic, more profit
I knew a guy who used to run arbitrage websites, not sure if he still does since we are no longer in contact... what he did was writing quality content, then used cheap native traffic to get some eyeballs to it and those people helped to start the viral wave. It didn't click each of the times obviously, but when it did, the ROI was out of this world
Trying to wrap my head around this, but why would someone create a content arb site without knowing how well it would perform? Like how we test an offer, we wouldn't create new landing pages, but test already proven landing pages.
Originally Posted by stungads
But look at it this way... all the creative materials, campaigns, landing pages, full funnels ... that you copy from someone, still had to be created and tested by someone in the first place, they don't fall "proven" from the heaven. And try to guess who profited the most from them.. the original creator who figured out they worked great, or the 1000 copycats that are ripping them from each other for the next few years? I'm sure you know the answer.
Originally Posted by stungads
Some of those content arb sites like Livestly have like 50+ employees if I'm not mistaken... But yeah, like anything else it's incremental... if you have a blog with a couple slideshows making XX revenue per person who clicks into it organically, it's not a far jump to then take it to paid traffic and just buy clicks into it... Or if you have a content site where you're buying traffic to build the brand, and you know that for every one page article you typically make YY revenue from your adsense monetization, it's not a big jump to then turn that page into a 4 part slideshow or one long-form article with repeating widgets, and then do the same And then also, a lot of those articles are recycled... not necessarily 'ripped' or 'copied'... but for instance, if you know that a slidshow called '35 Images Of Golfer Paige Spiranac' is running everywhere and obviously doing well, it wouldn't be a big leap of faith to pick out some other young blonde female athlete and make an identical slideshow about her...
Actually I would guess the content arb guys think WE are crazy for running big ticket offers instead lol... they know they're always going to do decent, since they're paying such a tiny amount for clicks and that the margins will always be pretty close in either direction, but as an affiliate you can easily drop 1-2k on an offer that doesn't work... even more if it's something you're doing up from scratch...
Originally Posted by stungads
Well, that's called taking risks and being innovative. It does not always pay off, but when it does, it pays off big.
It is not for everyone, because it requires to leave one's confort zone.
When you get more experienced in a field, you can guess what is going to work, or rapidly find out with a limited amount of data.
We took the risk and still doing it
Actually its been a while, almost 4 years now since we started being "SHINEZ"
As the guys mentioned, in order to do it on scale you have to do it right and its not that easy as it's sound...
You have to create lots of content daily, strong tech, high-end analytics, automation, cash flow, recruit tier 1 SSP's and lots more!
Of course this means you have to have a pretty large team, for us in 4 years we grow to an operation of 30 people not includes freelancers content writers.
It works well on Native but also on social platforms - traffic is around 50/50 on our side
There are a lot of advantages like - no offers, no caps, no charge back, no shipment issues, no customer service, it is complaint (white), you can target worldwide etc.
Feel free to hit me up if you have more questions!
Cheers,
Kinan
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