expertSEM

One of the recurring annoyances of internet surfing is the presence of Made For AdSense (MFA) sites. The basic premise is simply arbitrage, the same as any pure advertising supported site. They attract users at some cost, and then get paid more than that initial cost when the user clicks off the site. The attraction phase of this process may take the form of writing a clever blog, providing a unique or in demand service, or even paying directly to send traffic to the homepage.

What distinguishes the MFA site as absolute garbage is how crassly they engage in this transaction, generally paying a low cost PPC Engine for inbound traffic, without any real attempt at providing anything like content, and then trying to redirect the traffic to the highest paying links or affiliate programs. Rather than explain further, here’s an example:

You will note there are essentially two ways to leave this site without using the “Back” button (more on that later); click a sponsored listing, or click “related searches”. The sponsored search section is fairly straightforward. They may be buying inbound traffic for $.05 CPC, and selling their outbound traffic for $2 CPC. The related searches are an attempt to redirect the user to an even higher paying outbound CPC, or even an affiliate program, such as a Seventeen Magazine signup form.

It’s easy to see how this makes a crumby user experience, the links are not at all related to one another, and it is just the site owner’s crass attempt to arbitrage a couple of cents out of wasting your time. What is difficult to understand is how these guys make money at all, back up to the different inbound and outbound CPC rates.

They may be buying traffic for $.05, and selling for $2, which would work like gangbusters IF… They had a 100% Click Through Rate (CTR) from landing page to a sponsored link. However, PPC professionals such as ourselves will note that even extremely relevant and well known commerce sites are lucky to get a 25% page to page click through. That’s why it’s called a Conversion Funnel, because at every step of an online transaction, more and more users drop off, or bounce (the industry term for this is Bounce Rate), creating a funnel shape if it is graphed out by page sequence.

So if an extremely relevant site gets 25%, what can an MFA site get? Well, using the numbers from the example, they need a 5% rate just to break even, not including the site development and hosting costs, but I think even this is optimistic. Given that most internet users are indeed familiar with the “BACK” button in 2008, and MFA sites are so horridly recognizable as useless, I’d be shocked if they got more than a 2% CTR off of their landing page.

But this can’t be true, because in that scenario, every inbound click would lose them money, and if we all believe my high school economics professor, no firm will continue to operate at a loss for long. So what is the special sauce that keeps these guys developing (crappy) sites and paying for hosting? I know another tactic is to spam message boards and blog comments with their URLs (don’t get any ideas, dear reader), but still, what amount of traffic could they possibly get for spending hours posting comments, circumventing Captchas, and dodging the message board monitors?
I didn’t say I had an answer, I’m actually fishing for one here. Any purveyors of this type of site care to chime in with some specifics of how this works? Real figures would be appreciated, though feel free to anonymize your site’s name. We’re trying to figure out why you would waste your time with this, when you could just write a captivating and well researched internet blog and generate your money the old fashioned way, by providing something of value to customers.