Sry but what you are doing? Buy traffic from what sites to your adsense site? I guess this model is highly rely on the PV and click rate on your adsense site, yeah, you can use whatever viral topoics, just make your user eager to click as many pages as he/she want like a crazy and like no tomorrow, and want to click your adsense ads as much as possible.
And I think the real difference is you have to use an AD server to switch your display ads, thus the results can be positive?! (I don't know)
Purely adsense arbitrage I don't know if it will work or not, like you said, negative results. Adsense + other ADs like CPA = profit ( I guess)
So you buy traffic from Taboola network to your adsense site? You only use adsense site?