Upselling Ad arbitrage – buying web traffic and then selling that inventory on a website for more than it was originally paid for – is universally decried but is also still a lucrative strategy. The enterprise data software company DeepSee published a report showing how many arbitrage sites differ their content display when it comes to accessing websites from a paid link versus a direct link. Direct visitors, for example, would see a single-page format with no ads above the fold (an indicator of quality content). Meanwhile, those clicking to the same page via a paid link may see a busy slideshow format that loads and reloads the page, often with many ad spots stuffed above the fold. Scammers do this to avoid the ire of SSPs, which may have policies against the “hyper-active” version of the sites. But SSPs have employees who vet publishers themselves (i.e., they visit the site directly, seeing the pristine version). “This gives the illusion of quality, while the most clicked links are actually stuffed to the gills with ad units that refresh aggressively,” the report states.