Kevin Ham also known as "the man who owns the internet" head of the Reinvent Media Group wants you to check your credit score online... Badly! If you visit pottery.com or diseases.com, menopause.com, dateandtime.com mufflers.com and so on and so on there is a text link there right in your face that if you click on it.. It takes you to a parked page filled with credit score PPC ads. This is a classic attempt at traffic arbitrage. You take crappy traffic that doesn't convert well or traffic that the payouts suck for (really low, below 10 cents on average) and make an attempt to throw it at PPC ads that do pay well, usually a few dollars per click, hoping to get at least a few clicks here and there and squeeze out just a lil more than you would with the more traditional on-topic setup.
Kevin Ham / Reinvent Media Group / Hitfarm are trying to redirect as many of the visitors from their high trafficked domains as possible right now such as freevideo.com fileshare.com haircuts.com boxers.com commercials.com etc.. to a single parked domain filled with high paying finance related ads so that they can make some decent money off of that traffic. Why not?! They need it... One million per week is simply not enough.
The main problem and beef I have with this setup and operation that they are running is that when you take totally untargeted traffic and try to game everybody and nobody has pointed this out or done anything about it as it is still going on for a while now... Even more people will start doing it. This practice is unacceptable. The advertisers should be pissed. They pay top dollar to be on the most targeted Finance related properties on the internet such as Yahoo.com and for their ads to be in front of pre-qualified users who search for credit score queries...
Which is Yahoo's job by the way, to pre-qualify the users that are viewing the ads in the first place who have the opportunity to click if they have genuine interest in it. The users visiting Kevin Ham's domains are looking for boxers, diseases, mufflers, etc... They don't want credit scores but Kevin Ham is trying to give it to em anyways. Even if they do click through on the next two pages and end up on an advertisers site I bet you that most of them will never ever sign up or count as a "conversion" which Kevin Ham of course doesn't care about whatsoever. He got paid for the clicks... He is a "major player" and can do whatever. Unstopable! Ain't that something?!
Yahoo is terrible at enforcing some of their most basic rules and the traffic search quality of the domain name channel is so poor.. Wow. Don't even get me started on it. This is one of the reasons why most professional search engine marketers opt out of it once they figure it out or don't use Yahoo Search Marketing at all after they get burned too many times. It's just too much of a hassle and not worth it. Yahoo has so many problems... And this issue is just a small one. Click fraud which originates from the domain channel is the biggest one which I will post up and elaborate on in another article another time --- I have a lot of data and stuff to write about on this subject and will need to organize it all nicely. It's been in the works for a while. It will be published soon... It's going to shock you all. It will send shockwaves throught the web.
So anyways... Traffic arbitrage is OK if you take traffic from one specific domain or source and throw it at another that is related to it or within the same vertical. Something like Frank Schilling of Name Administration does with consolidateddebt.com and savingmoney.com for example --- You see, if you visit it... At the top you have a "NAMedia Listings" that links you up to personalloans.com which is Frank Schilling's parked page full of PPC ads also from Yahoo's feed. So you are taking Finance related traffic and throwing it at a more or less related ad inventory... Which is OK. No problem here. No beef... Smart move Franky! Get that money... Cha ching !!
What Kevin Ham does with diseases.com mufflers.com hdtv.com and so on... Not cool. It is totally BS. But that is classic arbitrage. You take cheap and low qualify traffic and lots of it... Throw it at high paying PPC ads and you will definitely get a few clicks and make a profit. It's been going on for years. Nothing new. I've done it as well, where I bought geo-targeted real estate traffic (10,000s of keywords related to major cities in the USA / Canada) from Microsoft AdCenter for .05 cents and redirected it to high paying Google and Yahoo real estate optimized parked pages that paid $1+ per click.. The click through rates are usually around 20 to 30% but I've seen them higher too. Depends on a couple of things... But you make a nice profit at the end of the day with very little work either way. It's all on auto-pilot if you find the right niche and know what you are doing. Kevin Ham has free type in traffic. Nice!
There is lots of money to be made if you have lots of volume with arbitrage... So, yea --- just wanted to write about this and point this out. Traffic arbitrage is OK if you do it the right way and don't piss anybody off. Kevin Ham does it the wrong way and gets away with it... But of course he can. Nobody else could of gotten away with this stuff. It is after all the guy who owns all of the typos such as facebook.cm google.cm aol.cm ebay.cm and so on. Yahoo doesn't want to monetize those typos so Kevin Ham redirects them to actual sites... No idea whos though. Probably some affiliates or partners that he recruited. Whatever!
Yahoo does monetize the generic domains such as videos.cm sports.cm dating.cm etc... With a partnership they have in place with Kevin Ham through their search engine Agoga.com where all the wildcard domain traffic is captured and redirected to. You know... Google would of never done this or agreed to this type of setup. Ever! They would of been grilled and owned within the first 24 hours. Yahoo on the other hand is obviously desperate for traffic, always has been and will be in order to stay competitive... Needs to sell off their ad inventory and make money badly...
Lots of double standards in the PPC game even with the giants as you can see. If you are an advertiser at Yahoo and you aren't staying on top of things... Your budget is gonna dry up quick and you won't know what hit you. Quality of paid search traffic over at Google is the best. Yahoo is involved in too much dirty biz. But who cares right? It's business as usual... Money makes the world go round. That is the core of the domain industry. Parking; Dirty biz! Surprised?!
Observations at WannaDevelop.com
02/23/2010: Dozens of Amazon affiliate stores for sale.. Developed by DomainMassDevelopment.com 01/11/2010: Wanna be part-owner of DomainState.com with myself and a few others? Ok, read this now... 11/02/2009: FS gets it on with WP... It's about time, no??!?! 08/24/2009: If all else fails... Who is gonna pay the bills?!! 08/22/2009: Frank Schilling has the winning formula $$$$$$
