Sourced (purchased) traffic

Publishers sometimes pay to bring visitors to their sites, for example by running ads on social media or in content recommendation widget widgets. That is sourced, or purchased, traffic. It is not automatically bad: many respected publishers promote articles this way. The risk is that cheap traffic vendors often deliver bots, click farms or accidental clicks.

Sourced traffic is at the heart of traffic arbitrage: buying visitors cheaply and selling the ads they see for more. Sites that depend heavily on it, especially made-for-advertising sites, can have high invalid traffic rates and low-attention audiences. Because low-cost traffic sources frequently resell bot traffic, TAG and MRC-accredited vendors pay close attention to it.

For transparency, the IAB Tech Lab supplyChain object and OpenRTB carry signals that allow sellers to disclose traffic sourcing, and many buyers ask publishers what share of their audience is purchased. Good practice for publishers is to vet vendors, measure IVT separately for each source, and drop sources whose visitors never scroll, return or convert.

Think of it like this

It is like a nightclub paying a promoter to bus people in: some are real guests who dance, but a cheap promoter may bring people who leave after one minute, or cardboard cut-outs.

An example

A lifestyle site spends $0.02 per visit on a recommendation network and earns $0.05 in ad revenue per visit. A verification report shows 28% IVT on the purchased visits versus 2% on organic ones.