Arbitrage: the practice of buying cheaper keywords on PPC search engines and directing the traffic to your site, which is mostly, if not all, is composed of CPC ads. Does anyone do this still, successfully? If you are somehow skooting by, I must imagine the profits are getting thinner. I don't want to say it's impossible, but for all intensive purposes, it is pretty much dead.
Adsense smart-pricing as nearly squeezed the life out of Adsense arbitrage. Not really worth anyones time nowadays.
At its height, arb., I made more than 10K a month. Now, it's all gone, or not possible. And I tried and tried again, using numerous ways, to try and skoot by - the magic is just not there anymore.
Arbitrage is dead. You need to work differently to make any money with adsense these days. But it can be done.
Hmm.. I must know some freaking ghost then... because I know and work with guys spending a few thousand a day on this type of activity. Arb is definitely not dead.
imho-- did some adsense arbitrage while it was easy... as others noted the game changed. The players I see involved are tied strictly to google; they generate traffic from multiple source & collect revenue from multiple ad/cpa networks. The game is playing one network against the other, so the price model becomes profitable. The way I worked it, the last few $$$ I squeezed was to drive traffic to one of my dropshipping sites that had alot of pages but lagging sales & had a dead-SEO due to link-farming (which squeezed a few bucks before the google-slap hit) , using cheap traffic networks... then running google-ads on those pages. Is this really arbitrage -- dunno but can make a few bucks, if you can keep on top of good traffic. I gave up on the SEO & links & regular traffic & just boosted cheap traffic to collect ad-revenue. Doing this earned me $10-$15/hr (per actual hour worked, not every hour of the day) for my time. It is arbitrage in the sense of only flipping traffic & not working on the content, SEO or links, etc. But there was content involved. Not exactly auto-pilot due to the research, but could be scaled to increase profits. I'd say arbitrage is not dead, just not easy pickings. I'm currently experimenting on this again with info sites & will see how it goes.