Only a quarter? Must have been a high-quality source.
The thing is a lot of publishers are fully aware of the fact that the traffic is mostly fraudulent. The ones who rely on bogus metrics such as Quantcast, Hitwise, Comscore, Alexa, etc. They buy up a ton of second tier search traffic for extremely low PPCs, we're talking sub-penny, and use that to inflate their "visitors" metric which is then used to sell how popular their site is to large brand advertisers.
I somehow doubt that any PPC search traffic, even 2nd tier, is cheap enough to arbitrage off in this manner. PPC costs have climbed over the years and any PPC -> CPM arbitrage seems unlikely to me these days. I'm thinking they have other sources. Do you know for a fact it's PPC search they're sourcing visitor count from?
I can't speak for today but in 2008-2010 this was definitely the case. It's not exactly a direct arbitrage play as a lot of the end advertisers tend to be doing full media buys. Top banner ad, background page ads and they are just paying for 100% coverage for a day or week or month. One large gaming news/reviews site was buying about $10k/day worth of mostly fraudulent traffic. The traffic wasn't bots, per se, it was "real" users but they had compromised machines with popups and toolbars. So there was a high visit count of real users but there was no conversion metrics or time-on-site to be measured. They continued buying the traffic for at least a month so I can only assume it was meeting their goals. We had a lot of publishers all doing the same thing.
As this was second tier, I wouldn't really call it "search" traffic. Just a ton of users with keyword-like queries being routed to various xml feeds/exchanges. When we'd send the traffic to actual publishers with conversion goals the rates were abysmal and we'd end up issuing lots of refunds. The only publishers that seemed to like the traffic were ones that sold their own dedicated ad units to large brand advertisers.
Yeah this kind of scenario is absolutely realistic. I've seen, firsthand, stuff that makes the above look downright honorable, and done by major, major players.
When there's money and success at stake, it's difficult to be too cynical about what tactics are probably being employed.
Motion Seconded. To the best of my knowledge this is not an economically viable traffic inflation technique in todays ecosystem.
Possible, but not much value for an arbitrage savvy publisher.
Not going to name names, but a good deal of fuckery is afoot in under article link exchange widgets. You know the ones, the boxes with link bait thumbnails that show up on a good deal of popular entertainment sites. Dealt with a lot of fake traffic coming through from the link exchange network. It appeared other publishers were sending tons of fake bot clicks to our site, in order to give themselves a higher amount of free reciprocal traffic from the link exchange.
Outbrain, Taboola and the other "content recommendation networks" are selling clicks in the $0.05-0.15 CPC range. Those prices are going higher and higher, but publishers are buying up all the traffic they can at those prices to arbitrage against their direct-sold inventory.
I've been fortunate enough to have first-hand access to the analytics platforms of a number of fairly high-traffic sites (in the tens-to-hundreds of millions of unique visitors per month), and not once did Hitwise, Alexa, or any of those estimates come anywhere close to actual data. There was nothing shady about the way these sites got their traffic–the vast majority was organic, because they're sites everyone here has heard of–but for some reason the third-party data was just bogus. Like, not unreasonably outside the realm of totall-made-it-up bogus.
It's worth remembering that sites like comScore, Quantcast, Alexa and Hitwise derive a solid chunk of their business by enabling Google sales reps to better convince clients to spend more money. It's not far off from an academic whose career depends on grants by parties who are heavily invested in seeing a particular outcome.
The thing is a lot of publishers are fully aware of the fact that the traffic is mostly fraudulent. The ones who rely on bogus metrics such as Quantcast, Hitwise, Comscore, Alexa, etc. They buy up a ton of second tier search traffic for extremely low PPCs, we're talking sub-penny, and use that to inflate their "visitors" metric which is then used to sell how popular their site is to large brand advertisers.