I've followed with some amount of interest recently various articles, blogs, emails, posts, etcetera, yadda, using the word "arbitrage". Some companies pride themselves on their ability to arbitrage, while others are disgusted by the term.
Dictionary.com tells me the definition is "The purchase of securities on one market for immediate resale on another market in order to profit from a price discrepancy."
Historically "immediate resale" indicates little to no value add for the intermediary. Given that "immediate" implies time spent, not complexity of methodology, these days a company who immediatly resells a visitor or lead could indeed argue they are adding a lot of value through a sophisticated matching and/or pricing and/or optimization technology. As such I would encourage those that are insulted by the description of a part of their biz ops as arbitrage to relax. By nature it simply references immediate resale, which is the majority part of most intermediaries business. By definition it does not exclude monetizing via longer term value from the consumer, although it may imply it is not as important as it is to many "arbitragers" in particular the comparison shopping engines who average 2-3 visits and/or "clicks out" per "paid click " from the engines, on average. Hard to distinguish LTV from a first time visitor clicking out 2 or 3 times in their initial visit and never returning though, when looking at comparison engines.
Regardless, the term "arbitrage" IMHO is rapidly headed toward the Cliche of the week despite the fact that most of these referenced cliches have had far more mileage.
Myself, most of the businesses I am involved in are arbitraging in some regard, given the definition. I'm not scared of the word, nor am I embracing it as a good description of their ops. I suppose I am ready to leave this word alone, for better or worse.
--Sidenote. I just reg'ed SEarbitrage.com and AdSenseless.com. I am particularly excited about adsenseless. If you want a service that delivers completely unrelated and useless ads to your site, and pays you nothing, drop me a line. I am working on the service that is perfect for you......
--Not sure what to do with SEarbitrage right now, but it might be amusing to faciliate people to belittle the large number of companies whose primarily business line is buying and reselling search traffic? There seems to be a lot of pent-up consternation towards companies that do this broad-scale.
