[omarchowdhury]

Do you have more information on how I can see a live view of the practices you discussed in your last paragraph? I was under the impression that traffic from the top portals was costly and not exactly suitable as a component in an arbitrage play like you mentioned.

[snide]

Visit http://www.yahoo.com/ right now. Scroll through the stories and find one that doesn't link to an internal yahoo or yahoo owned property.

You'll run into one of the following scenarios in most of them.

* It drops you on an interstitial ad before the "article" loads.

* It drops you onto a click trap "gallery" where you are forced to click for each new image.

More often than not it's to a site that you've never really heard of and isn't very well produced vs. their more well known (to a literate Internet audience) competitors.