Please pardon me if this ends up being a (automated) duplicate post of a comment, but having left this page “open” overnight to return to this morning, when I did press the “submit comment” button, my first attempt at a comment just seemed to disappear.
So, plowing ahead in any case:

I just discovered “click arbitrage”, and in researching it (and opinions about it) I came across your note at searchbeest.wordpress.com (here).

I found it highly ironic the link you included to go to the example page of [nothing but] the more expensive sponsored links was, here in searchbeest.wordpress.com flagged with a popup sponsored by WordPress.com and SNAP search tool. Oddly, although it offered 4 choices of phrases which all appeared to be related to ticket brokering, all of them resulted in the same 3 entry SNAP page regardless of which phrase you chose to click.

Worse than that, two of the three entries on the SNAP page were actually of very little use in terms of finding tickets to Stevie Wonder or even ticket brokers in general. As compared to a “whole page” of links, which, not entirely coincidentally, appears to be the same page you pointed to is also the one result from SNAP that was a relatively good search result, the “whole page” sounds like it was a better step in the right direction than the popup link provided by wordpress.com.

Adding an extra level of click between the user and the result that they are seeking does seem, on the surface, to be less efficient and potentially a cause for concern that it could, overall, affect the price scale for advertisers to purchase sponsored links (and thereby clicks) to acquire customers online. However, if you compare it to the feeble results from this particular “example” (two irrelevant links and one that was the same place as originally intended) that in this world of information overload, winnowing down the choices to a page worth of links can be a value-add service that makes all the links more valuable.

It also stimulates a whole secondary low cost tier of click advertising market that might not otherwise exist, and serves to feed the higher priced clicks, therefore becoming a valued service itself as adjunct marketing which the “retailer” (who purchased the higher priced click link) did not have to pay for, it was a cost to the arbitrageur.

My investigations into this whole field, plus the opportunity to work out my thoughts “on paper” (so to speak) here in this comment makes me think that I will be looking more seriously into getting my toes wet, if not jumping in with both feet to the whole “click arbitrage” market myself.