Basics · also called arbitrageur, affiliate, traffic buyer
Media buyer
A media buyer is the person who purchases advertising to bring visitors to a page, deciding what to bid, whom to target and which ads to run.
In search arbitrage the media buyer is the trader. They open a campaign on a traffic source, write or commission the creative, choose a keyword theme and a country, set a budget and watch the numbers. Their aim is simple: keep the cost of each visitor below what the visitor earns from the search feed.
A day's work is mostly measurement. The buyer compares CPC with RPC for every campaign, switches off losers, raises budgets on winners (scaling) and tests new ads to fight ad fatigue. Because feed revenue arrives with a delay and may be revised, buyers work with estimates and have to judge how far to trust them.
Media buyers range from solo operators using a feed provider to teams of dozens inside large arbitrage firms. The role carries real financial exposure, since ad platforms charge within days while feeds pay weeks later. It also carries compliance responsibility: the wording of each ad must match what the landing page delivers, and under Google's rules that wording must now be reported with every visit.
Think of it like this
A media buyer is like a market trader who buys stock every morning and must sell it for more by evening, checking prices on both sides all day.
Related terms
Campaign
A campaign is one organised advertising effort on a platform, with its own budget, targeting, bids and set of ads.
Traffic source
A traffic source is the platform or channel that visitors come from, such as Facebook ads, a native ad network or a search engine.
Creative
A creative is the actual advertisement a person sees: its image or video, headline, text and button.
Scaling
Scaling is increasing a profitable campaign's ad spend to earn more total profit, ideally without eroding the return that made it worth growing.
Ad spend
Ad spend is the money paid to advertising platforms to buy traffic; in search arbitrage it is the main cost of the business.
Cash-flow float
Cash-flow float is the money an arbitrage business must fund between paying for traffic today and receiving the matching feed revenue weeks later.