Yahoo Eliminates Arbitrage
February 12th, 2008Parked.com just sent an email to its customers, advising that Arbitrage as of Feb 14th, will no longer be tolerated at any parking providers using a Yahoo feed (including Parked.com). The following email was just sent:
Dear Parked.com customers,
We were notified today by Yahoo that all Yahoo based parking companies, including Parked.com, must begin enforcing the no arbitrage/no paid traffic general provision. As a reminder, Section 2 Subsection g. in the Parked.com Terms of Service states:
“All other types of traffic including bought traffic, traffic driven by PPC campaigns, traffic directed from hyperlinks are not permitted. If your traffic originates from any sources other than type-in and search engine traffic, you will not be entitled to payment as per this Agreement. Regular checks are carried out and we reserve the right to suspend any domain from our Service at any time, on our sole discretion, if we reasonably believe that you have violated this Agreement; for example, if we suspect that the traffic on your domain is bought, generated or redirected in any way that contravenes these terms and conditions.”
For more information please see http://www.parked.com/tos/.
Accordingly, all arbitrage must stop effective 1pm PST on Thursday, February 14, 2008. Even though arbitrage will no longer be allowed, all accounts will still be paid.
If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact your account manager.
We thank you for your business and continued support.
What does this mean? It appears that Parking Arbitrage is coming to a clean quick death. Quite a few people were making a substantial amount of money using this “frowned upon” technique. Expect many people to be upset, and looking for a new way to recoup that cash flow. Interesting to note, I recently gave parking arbitrage a try, and found it to be a very complicated and a difficult challenge, to convert cheaper traffic to higher paying traffic. Although I never came close to mastering the practice, I am sorry to see it go. On another note it is interesting that Yahoo has opted to stop taking advantage of this gravy train. Im sure more news will come in in the coming days and weeks.
Justin
Arbitrage is NOT god for the user exerience and HORRIBLE for advertisers.
A great move!
Comment by Francois — February 12, 2008 @ 3:41 pm
Francois,
I don’t necessarily Agree with you. It essentially is putting the user onto another page of advertisers, however that doesn’t change the fact that it was profitable for yahoo. I am hopeful that we will hear Yahoo’s explanation soon in regards to this.
Justin
Comment by admin — February 12, 2008 @ 5:10 pm
Can’t you do arb from yahoo to google instead of google to yahoo like you were?
Comment by Ryan — February 13, 2008 @ 11:11 am
Ryan,
I believe Google does not allow Parking Arbitrage. For example you cannot buy traffic from yahoo and send to a google feed provider.
Justin
Comment by admin — February 13, 2008 @ 11:50 am
So what’s the next iteration? Developing simple sites with adsense/yahoo and arbitraging to there? Seems like that’s the way to go now. Might be worth the development time for those arbitrage campaigns. I assume that gets by the issue since you’re not displaying an ad feed?
Comment by Ryan — February 13, 2008 @ 5:02 pm