Buying traffic · also called native ads, native
Native advertising
Native advertising is paid promotion designed to look like the editorial content around it, typically a headline and thumbnail shown beneath or beside articles on news sites.
Native ads are the "You may also like" boxes and in-feed story cards on news and magazine sites. They copy the look of the site's own headlines, which is why platforms and regulators require a visible label such as "Sponsored" (see native ad disclosure).
For a search arbitrage business, native is one of the oldest ways to buy visitors. A media buyer pays a network such as Taboola, Outbrain (now part of Teads) or MGID per click, sends the reader to a content page or keyword lander, and earns when that reader clicks a sponsored listing from the search feed. This pairing is known as Native-to-search.
Native clicks tend to be cheaper than search clicks but carry weaker search intent, because the reader was browsing, not searching. That makes headline honesty and site-level control (the blocklist) the two levers that decide whether the traffic keeps its value in the feed's eyes.
Think of it like this
It is like an advertorial in a newspaper: it sits among the real stories and reads like one, but someone paid for the space and the page must say so.
An example
Say a buyer pays $0.12 per native click for a headline about "new SUV deals", and each visitor earns $0.17 on average from the feed. The 5 cent gap is the spread, before any clawback.
Related terms
Content recommendation widget
A content recommendation widget is a block of sponsored and editorial story links on a publisher's page, supplied by a network that pays the publisher for clicks.
Native-to-search (N2S)
Native-to-search is buying visitors from native ad widgets on news sites and sending them to a page that earns from search ads.
Native ad disclosure
Native ad disclosure is the label that tells readers a headline or article styled like editorial content is actually paid advertising.
Clickbait
Clickbait is a headline or image engineered to provoke a click through exaggeration, withheld information or shock, without delivering what it implies.
Placement
A placement is the specific website, app, section or screen position where an ad appears.
Paid traffic
Paid traffic is visitors who reach a website because the site owner paid for an advertisement that brought them there.
Sources: Teads: Outbrain completes the acquisition of Teads (February 2025)