Originally Posted by xenigo

I made a few phone calls this evening to affiliate managers and program owners and asked the questions raised in this thread. The answers were "hell no I wouldn't pay for traffic generated by PPC on our own keywords... and besides, these are mentioned in our TOS." And the other answer is "it's your own fault if you aren't the top bidder for your own keywords. Google will sell the traffic to anyone."

Do I think it's right to buy the term "crackwhore confessions" to send the traffic to a site that already has the #1 result? No. It's similar to Costco paying you $50 for selling $39 / year memberships... bringing them traffic they wouldn't have otherwise had. But you go and set up a booth right outside Costco to sell memberships. They wouldn't allow this, and for good reason. You're not helping Costco by doing that, you're only helping yourself. It was already their traffic. If you did that outside Walmart, it might be a different story. Walmart still wouldn't allow it, though.