If you pay 20 cent and get 25 cent per click you would need a really tremendous click-rate to make a profit. I think those numbers are a bad example.

Nah, it is a fine example.

People get a little confused on this issue because most who do it don't specify if they're talking net or gross.

For instance someone might gross 50k a month doing this, but since they paid for all their traffic they might have expenses of $45k, making a nice net profit of $5k total.

Overall I'm very glad Google is finally doing this. It'll take awhile for advertisers to come back to the content network, but hopefully they do eventually come back now that the garbitrage sites will be gone.

I think come July,1st things are going to change and google will finally patent their powered by satan logo.

What? They are going to close it and I haven't even played this game that seriously yet. Well I guess, the future is...

- Do Adsense and do SEO and SMO.

And

- Do Adwords, and do Affiliate Marketing.

It never works you always get caught and just saying that because it just can't work if you try it with adwords to pump a .07 and get a adsense check " Doubt it if its alot of traffic " it will be exactly what you paid lol. I know because I did it in the past.

If they can't make it work with adwords imagine if you tried it with some other ppc system like kanoodle which can eclipse googles traffic base 10 fold for way less money. You can imagine will all the stars of PPC out their they can't even afford to run one campaign to a adsense monetized website.

If they rotated all the adwords accounts in googles database even and made it 0 percent relevant they would go broke in days. If not hours if more than one guy did it. I mean its not like I work for the CIA and know they only have 70 grand to pay all adsense publishers a month and the budget is now under 30 grand.

-Cheers Mark Manitar

Well since these emails went out I've seen revenue go up - so maybe that's why Google are doing it? Possibly they make more money without the abritrageurs in the system....

I have all reasons to believe that by driving visitors to your site using AdWords and earning using AdSense is legitimate. Or otherwise, how would webmasters want to subscribe for Google AdWords?

There's a difference between running both AdWords and AdSense on a site, and running a pure arbitrage site that has zero content. Arbitrage means exploiting flaws and loopholes in the system to make money for nothing. All it does is waste advertiser dollars and take away earnings from legitimate AdSense webmasters.

You can think of it as AdWords/AdSense spam. It dilutes the value of both ad programs as these sites do not reach out to real customers, they just take them from one end and shoot them out the other.

It's called frigging GREED... these friggign guys are making 70k a month thats more than i make in 3.5 years at my day job! Yet their launching more and more of the damn sites to continue to try to earn more of course the da*n bubble was going to burst. had they kept it somewhat reasonable it would have lasted and continued, but noooo we've got idiots with 1.5 million MFA sites, and 4M page arbitrage networks pulling in 50-100k a month and they wonder why googles shutting them down. Hell if i hit 3k a month in adsense reliably in white/gray/blue hat hell i'd stop right their, why because the more you push something the more you draw attention.

It's called frigging GREED... these friggign guys are making 70k a month thats more than i make in 3.5 years at my day job! Yet their launching more and more of the damn sites to continue to try to earn more of course the da*n bubble was going to burst. had they kept it somewhat reasonable it would have lasted and continued, but noooo we've got idiots with 1.5 million MFA sites, and 4M page arbitrage networks pulling in 50-100k a month and they wonder why googles shutting them down. Hell if i hit 3k a month in adsense reliably in white/gray/blue hat hell i'd stop right their, why because the more you push something the more you draw attention.

I had 3 of my premium 1-word domains shut down this week by Google. I went to Yahoo instead. The jury is still out on what the % loss on CPM I will see. :(

If some one cam make a scam it will be done. but $70,000 a month? I wish I made $70 a month.

I see how it works, but $70K a month would require a million dumb people continously clicking on the same frickin ad

so just use overture to advertise and adsense to monetize.

It's late for google to squeeze out Arbitragers: The Income per Click is down to less than one third on the content network in May. It does not make sense to keep Adsense on a legimate site when eCPM is down to less than 1$.

I applaud Google for doing this, and I agree with Chris. Of course it's painful when the money stops flowing in, but whining about how they conform to the TOS is just unmanly. They had to know the bubble would burst. Deal with it and move on.

Thank God its finally ending. Was fed up of those MFA sites eating into revenues of decent blogs and websites. May their soul rest in peace (forever)

For instance someone might gross 50k a month doing this, but since they paid for all their traffic they might have expenses of $45k, making a nice net profit of $5k total.

Google lives up to their slogan of do no evil. Clap-clap!

I dont get what is wrong here? I mean people pay for advertisement to gain profit isnt it? I dont want traffic for nutts do i. Its called business investment, and if thats wrong, does that means adsense is only made for product sale? And if i do publish ads on my site, i should not use adwords.

Google only likes the right kind of arbitrageurs. They have said in the past that they have no problem with the model itself - they simply don't like sites that exist for that sole purpose. We ran a network of 15 sites that were written by professionals in their industries and Google effectively shut us down a few months ago. We were spending around $12k per month with them at the time. Also, one hand does not know what the other is doing at Google. Our rep had told us our sites were perfectly fine and then one day we were basically cut off at the knees. Our rep couldn't even tell us why except that the directive "came from the top." So now we don't employ anyone. Nice, eh?

I think this is very good. This will give legitimate sites with good info more opportunities.

bye bye MFA, welcome good site, we do appreciate your work :-)

This is not the end of MFA sites. Very far from it. What Google is doing here is they are only removing the arbitragers with the parked domain sites that buy massive amounts of keywords for between $0.01-$0.10 per click from Adsense mostly, but also for some longtail keywords on AdWords.

Are these guys making $70k a month or a year? Yeah, I happen to know a lot of them clearing the $30k+ makr every month. In fact, when I was doing it last year, we had one month where we were focusing primarily on high search volume keywords that paid us at least $0.60 per click, and never once spent more than $0.08 per click. Then again, I refuse to "crap where you eat" and did not buy traffic from Google to arbitrage right back onto Adsense.

There are plenty of cheap places to buy traffic from, where their users are clicking maniacs. Before Adsense started the whole "smart priced" ordeal, we were seeing our normal avg CTR from adsense at 40%-60% and higher.. then after we figured out how NOT to get smart priced, they never went that high again, but it was always over the 15% CTR mark.

But back onto topic here, what I like to call Arbitrage 2.0 is not what these domainers do. It's when you make an actual site, filled with content, and place your Adsense ads in places that people have been known to click, but not excessively. Instead of buying Google traffic and sending it to a MFA page/site, you buy from some cheap place, and send them to your much nicer looking MFA page/site. Sure, you may not get AS many clicks on it, but you can still target it pretty nicely, and make one hell of a profit from it.

The real beauty of the sites is that they don't look or feel like MFA's whatsoever. Just so long as you stick to your guns and do it that way, you'll be safe. It will probably take Google another 5-7 years to figure that out (if the traffic sucks, which it may or may not, too early to say really).

Ah how I miss the arbitrage days, before the rest of the world figured it out. But hey, like I said, there are still plenty of people out there absolutely BANKING on the stuff I spoke about above (and on my blog showing people how to do it). And as long as you remain more creative than greedy, and add some smarts to it, you can go on doing this for many many years to come. Remember.. Google Adsense isn't the only fish in the sea.

/long comment

Well yes it was a serious problem in their system.
Its surprising how long they allowed it to stay in the system

Sell short!

I think this is related to Google giving full content stats to advertisers:
http://www.ewhisper.net/blog/is-adsense-cleaning-house-before-advertisers-see-all-the-data/

Apparently these changes will affect non-MFA publishers as well, at least for a while. On his blog regarding this subject, Joel Comm says, "Google's initiative might mean a short dip in our earnings, but if it brings more advertisers back and fewer wasted clicks on the network, then that's good for all our futures."

A "short dip" for some of the rest of us. I've heard that Google accompanied this letter with some other changes, removing "spammy" sites as well, but it is evident that some of these sites are not so "spammy."

google is slowly starting to dictate what you can and can't do in a free market economy. Next stop - court a la Bill Gates.

Google danced your keywords out of organic Search results. Now you can't buy your traffic from them!
What does Google want? To close the Internet to small players altogether and leave only Fat Cats?
"Do no evil"? Please!!

Google should make it easier to report MFA sites :(