Consumables — are working tools that an affiliate marketer regularly spends money on when running advertising campaigns. They need to be replenished or replaced: for example, buying new accounts after bans, renewing proxies or registering domains for new advertising campaigns.
What counts as consumables in traffic arbitrage
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Accounts. Profiles on social networks and advertising platforms. Algorithms constantly block them for any suspicious activity, so affiliate marketers buy them by the dozen.
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Proxies. Third-party IP addresses that affiliate marketers use to access accounts without revealing their real device and location. These IPs quickly end up on advertising network blacklists and have to be replaced.
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Domains. Website addresses for landing pages and pre-landing pages. As soon as an advertising platform bans a link, the domain can be discarded and a new one registered.
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Payment methods (virtual cards). If an ad account gets banned, the card used to pay for advertising also becomes unusable (it will be rejected when you try to link it to a new ad account). Fresh cards are constantly needed for new accounts.
Important to know
Buying consumables — is a significant part of daily expenses that often eats into the budget unnoticed. When an affiliate marketer calculates their final earnings (profit), they must deduct all the money spent on accounts, cards and proxies from their revenue. Otherwise, a campaign may appear profitable on paper while actually running at a loss.
