Buying advertising traffic on one platform and monetising it on another for more than it cost, capturing the price difference.
Traffic arbitrage is the practice of acquiring traffic from a source (paid ads, push, pops, SEO) and directing it to an offer that pays out per action, keeping the margin between acquisition cost and revenue. The arbitrageur — often called a media buyer or affiliate — profits from a pricing inefficiency between the traffic source and the advertiser.
A typical funnel is: ad → prelander → offer → conversion → payout. Each stage loses volume, so profitability depends on cost per click, conversion rate, and the advertiser's accepted payout, minus fraud and rejected leads.
Verticals differ sharply in payout and risk: finance, crypto and gambling pay high per action but attract heavy fraud and moderation, while nutra and sweepstakes run on volume. Because margins are thin, small improvements in fraud filtering or approve rate move the whole economics.