what is the business model on this guy's Tortola travel guide site?
It seems like he isn't selling anything. Is he paying .07$ for adwords clicks hoping those people click on the ads on his site, he must have a crazy ctr to get that to work out?
There are some categories of ads that pay extremely high rates. Real estate and rental properties in high demand areas are among those categories.
Basically, the guy builds spam sites devoted to categories that he has found to provide high ad rates. He brings in as much qualified traffic as he can via lower price keywords and SEO, and then bombards them with those high rate ads. He is attempting to arbitrage the lack of knowledge the advertisers have of what keywords people are searching for, and their ability to garner traffic.
It's not a particularly high paying business on the scale of one site...but he builds many such sites, and then focus on the ones that pay. If you read up on SEO forums and such, this is incredibly common. It's what people with very low skills, a lot of free time, and a strong desire to "beat the system", do when they want to have an "Internet business". They provide no, or negative value, and make a few bucks a day per site.
If Google didn't have their very own version of this business (Google Syndication is a network of similar spam sites operated by Google), he'd probably get away with it. But, I guess Google doesn't want to share the profits.
That is the best explanation of the system that I have heard yet. I'll just add one thing. For many of such sites the content is scraped automatically from other site's feeds.
In that case it is even more borderline illegal. I'm not sure if that is what he did with his travel site, but if that is the case he has no business complaining about being banned.
How is it a scam? If you're going to visit Tortola - there's basically no information about how to get there anywhere. I list the top places to stay, eat, and beaches. I list all of the ferry services between there and st thomas.
It's better than registering domains with names of big companies - now that's a scam.
Comments
what is the business model on this guy's Tortola travel guide site?
It seems like he isn't selling anything. Is he paying .07$ for adwords clicks hoping those people click on the ads on his site, he must have a crazy ctr to get that to work out?
There are some categories of ads that pay extremely high rates. Real estate and rental properties in high demand areas are among those categories.
Basically, the guy builds spam sites devoted to categories that he has found to provide high ad rates. He brings in as much qualified traffic as he can via lower price keywords and SEO, and then bombards them with those high rate ads. He is attempting to arbitrage the lack of knowledge the advertisers have of what keywords people are searching for, and their ability to garner traffic.
It's not a particularly high paying business on the scale of one site...but he builds many such sites, and then focus on the ones that pay. If you read up on SEO forums and such, this is incredibly common. It's what people with very low skills, a lot of free time, and a strong desire to "beat the system", do when they want to have an "Internet business". They provide no, or negative value, and make a few bucks a day per site.
If Google didn't have their very own version of this business (Google Syndication is a network of similar spam sites operated by Google), he'd probably get away with it. But, I guess Google doesn't want to share the profits.
That is the best explanation of the system that I have heard yet. I'll just add one thing. For many of such sites the content is scraped automatically from other site's feeds.
In that case it is even more borderline illegal. I'm not sure if that is what he did with his travel site, but if that is the case he has no business complaining about being banned.
He does have links to reservation sites (e.g.: http://travel.ian.com). The adsense seems to be just for additional revenue.
Adsense provides an additional revenue stream for me.
Hotel bookings, ads for resorts and adsense.
It's actually a decent amount of money from a network of sites.
You realize that you're basically running a scam, right?
How is it a scam? If you're going to visit Tortola - there's basically no information about how to get there anywhere. I list the top places to stay, eat, and beaches. I list all of the ferry services between there and st thomas.
It's better than registering domains with names of big companies - now that's a scam.