The native campaign that lost to "low-quality" push

The native campaign that lost to "low-quality" push
Myth: "Push traffic for dating is bottom-of-barrel — native is where the real buyers are."

A buyer believed native was the upgrade and shifted a working push budget over. Same mainstream SOI offer, matched $5k tests.

Push: $0.018 CPC, 1.4% reg, CPA $8.20.
Native: $0.21 CPC, 2.9% reg, CPA $16.40.

Native converted twice as well and cost twice as much per acquisition. The "higher quality" reputation was real at the click level and irrelevant at the cost level. Push's terrible per-click quality was priced in — at under two cents a click, even a 1.4% reg rate printed money.

The quality myth ranks sources by how good each click is, ignoring that the market already prices quality into the click cost. The arbitrage lives in cheap, ugly sources where the price overcorrects for the low quality.

Reality: "low-quality" sources stay profitable precisely because everyone's been told they're bad and stopped bidding the price up.