Helen M. Overland

What is MFA and Click Arbitrage?

By: Helen M. Overland, Aug 5th, 2006


MFA: Made for AdSense

You may have come across the term "MFA" site before and wondered either what it was, or why people do it. The answer is really very simple: profit.

Since Google launched its' AdSense program, many people have been discovering better ways to make money with it.

The idea behind AdSense is simple - place ads on targeted pages, inviting qualified traffic to advertisers sites, and giving the publishers a share. Brilliant.

Publishers quickly realized, however, that some subjects generated a higher CPC for each ad click. This, probably very quickly, led to the idea of creating pages targeted to those more profitable subjects. And so the MFA site was born.

An MFA site is sometimes held to be a fairly blandish, but targeted template site. This perception is mostly due to MFA owners who create these sites in bulk. In reality, any page that has AdSense as its main motivation, no matter how well designed and implemented, is an MFA site.

MFA sites can use a variety of techniques to gain traffic. It can be promoted like any other site, using SEO, PPC, link building, viral marketing, and more. A few even build, or at the very least appear to build, communities of happy visitors.

One of the most efficient ways to gain traffic, however, is through PPC. MFA site owners therefore use this technique to gain traffic. Sometimes this is known as Click Arbitrage.

Click arbitrage is a technique that involves buying traffic at a low CPC, and reselling the same traffic for a higher CPC. This can be done in part due to the nature of the web, and in part due to how AdSense works.

Click arbitrage is really very simple - marketers create a highly targeted page, then use a PPC program (we'll use AdWords here) to buy traffic at the lowest possible bid price. Let's say our marketer is bidding $0.05. The ads will never be highly placed, but as long as they receive the occasional click, that's okay.

When a visitor clicking on one of these low-bid ads arrives at the MFA site, they are (usually) presented with an assortment of PPC links. Because the page is highly targeted, and the content network tends to favour higher-CPC ads, these ads (usually) have a much higher CPC than what the advertiser paid. Let's say the page is about "SEO". The MFA owner could make over $1 per click!

There is also the possibility that the traffic could click on more than one link, thus generating quite a substantial profit profit. And all this without more nefarious practices such as bot networks and "invalid clicks".

This doesn't mean that everyone should rush out and create a multitude of MFA sites, however. Making a business from offering little actual value has historically not been a good long-term investment strategy. Google has been taking steps to reduce the profitability of these techniques, with initiatives such as landing page quality checks, and using penalties of high minimum bid prices.

It is unlikely, however, that MFA sites or arbitrage sites are going to go away any times soon. Even if Google were to penalize (raise the minimum bid price) of every landing page showing AdSense ads, MFA marketers may still turn a tidy profit. For example, marketers could buy lower quality traffic from the smaller engines, or move the AdSense links to a secondary page.

As search marketing continues to evolve and grow, so does the number of ways to take advantage of the marketplace.


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