You Won’t Believe Which Publishers Are Buying Traffic From Taboola!
Since it appears that most folks who work in ad tech and most buyers didn't seem to realize that "arb" is as common as "white on milk" here's some data, inspired by Krzysztof F. 's tweet yesterday https://twitter.com/kfranasz/status/1559660987908853760 and Ruben Schreurs 's tweet today https://twitter.com/RubSchreurs/status/1559920210416701440
Even mainstream publishers have resorted to the practice of arbitrage -- "buy low, sell high." If they can buy traffic at a lower CPM than the CPM they get from ads, they arbitraged the opportunity and pocketed the difference. This may appear to work in theory, but simple calculations show that realistic click through rates blow up the math -- The Funny Math That Underpins Programmatic Digital Advertising This naive redditor confirms the suspicions https://www.reddit.com/r/adops/comments/jxd6fx/ads_arbitrage/ You'd continuously LOSE money if you did "arb" without cheating. To make arb work, you must cheat and get reliably delivered clicks/pageviews.
The cheating I am talking about is the ability of some content recommendation platforms to reliably deliver large quantities of clicks at very low CPMs or CPCs. That doesn't happen reliably and in large quantities if you relied on humans to click. Some humans click the clickbait content. Just like you can't force a whole bunch of humans to come to your site, you can't force a whole bunch of humans to click through. Since no one knows how many "impressions" it took to deliver those "clicks" and no one can verify the origins of the clicks, it is super easy for the fraudsters to manufacture the clicks. I don't mean with bots, mind you. They simply deliver the pageview, but the human user never actually clicked the click-baity tile. This is technically trivial -- by loading the entire destination page in the ad slot or content discovery tile, no click needed.
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Arb using one these commonly hated platforms is so widespread that a casual review of FouAnalytics data across campaigns show that sites big and small, premium and not so premium are all using this kind of sourced traffic. So to answer the question "you won't believe which publishers are buying traffic from Taboola" the answer is "all of them." In some cases they do it directly. In some cases they don't even know it's happening. Furthermore, none of this traffic will be marked as problematic by verification vendors, so everyone just merrily continues to buy it.
Like many practitioners already know, most of the stuff in programmatic is shady AF like this anyway. Be sure to look where you're stepping.
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2 年There are legit 'arb' plays. The RPM (revenue per 1000 page views) for each publisher page is a key input. Top quality sites with good content will have higher CPMs and thus potentially have higher RPMS- depending on the number of ads on a page. This should give them a big enough margin to look for legit traffic sources if they need it. Page specific analysis is also required in order to accurately determine the cost of traffic. Buying bot traffic may look good in the short run (easy arb $$) but in the long run, it will discourage brands from buying again.
Growth Director @ Exit Bee - Product, Client Services, Operations & Publisher Development
2 年Nothing new here.