Predators Ball
While Sendori, which aims to create an advertising marketplace for marketers to bid on domain redirects on a per visitor basis, sounds like a solid enough idea, it has the potential to create all sorts of whacky incentives and may even in fact hail a comeback for many made-for-adsense type webmasters.
Firstly, made-for-adsense (MFA) webmasters are a dark subset of direct navigation that are sometimes called arbitrage web sites. Although they can make a lot of money, I am hesitant to call them arbitrageurs because they take risks (i.e. that a certain percentage of visitors will click on higher paying ads) and arbitrage is by definition riskless.
MFA webmasters buy cheap traffic, say for 5 cents a pop, and then hope that anywhere between 33% and 50% of the time a visitor will click on a 20-30 cent text ad. Google’s quality score update fucked a lot of them up but that’s roughly the economics of the industry at the moment, as far as I can tell.
But Sendori essentially takes away a key component of that risk (i.e. the two in three times, or one in two times, that a consumer doesn’t click on the ad) by automatically re-directing them to the advertiser. MFA webmasters would assumedly replace Google AdSense with Sendori.
Sendori will no doubt position this as direct navigation and that the traffic is organic. But there are so many incentives for the owner of the domain to push junk traffic to the URL that the system wont work.
