I disagree with your message, and even though we all have our opinions I feel need to reply to this one as it may lead users like the apple guy wrong way.
I think none of us (even some Google employees) can give a definite answer regarding this. I personally have never gotten into Adsense arbitrage myself. I managed campaigns for one company, and have a few friends who got into the industry through this strategy, so I was able to see many of this first-hand. I can only talk about my experience and the experience from others.
For example, I had a friend who started adsense arbitrage, but struggled with losing money, breaking even, and finally breaking into profits. It looked like organic growth to Google. The same friend later helped another set of friends to avoid the same mistakes he made. Instead of going through that rough period, they made a profit their first week. The next month, had $400k in revenue. I actually joked with them they would get banned, and a few days before payday, they did.
To make my point that even Google staff can't give a definite answer, the same guys who got banned, were super paranoid and made sure to keep in touch with Adsense support to make sure their ad placements, CTR, etc. was OK. The same support team that assured them everything was fine is the same team that banned him. Luckily for them, they kept all emails, and was able to sue Google for their money back (they only got a settlement later). You can Google around and look at some articles about these lawsuits. I'm pretty sure you'll see the same people I'm talking about.
Pop traffic is a direct road to ban. We all know 'someone' who got away one-time, but I wouldn't suggest competing with a multi-billion dollar company.
I 100% agree with this. I was referring to more high quality traffic used for arbitrage - Native, Facebook, and Display.
There is nothing wrong with arbitraging. Every site that has Google Ads or using AdWords does arbitrage.
What Google does say you can't make money with them by scamming people and wasting their time, you need to provide real value.
To clarify what I mentioned, yes Google is fine with making money from ads, or why else would we be paying for it. But there's a grey area. If I'm promoting my ecommerce store related to what people are searching, there's no issue - I'm arbitraging, but providing value at the same time. What I believe OP is referring to (correct me if I'm wrong), is adsense arbitrage - buying cheap clicks and generating a profit from adsense ads. Usually these sites provide minimal value at best. It's typically a bunch of slideshow articles that are created specifically to generate ad impressions/clicks. On the other hand, sites that don't buy clicks and generate traffic via SEO typically have higher quality articles that answer a specific question. Google is OK with this, but arbitraging is a grey area IMO.
Not necessarily. Your site is not always refused by the human, not necessarily 'feelings' involved. 95% of those who apply, only do that because they want to make a quick buck with low-quality sites, which is the wrong approach. Low-quality sites don't bring revenue not for site owners, not for Google.
To clarify here, I'm talking about Google staff who review active sites. If you know what you're doing, getting accepted isn't the hard part. Once you start generating revenue, Google staff can and will review your site to make sure it aligns with Google's policies. In the case of traffic arbitrage (arbitraging for adsense clicks), I think it's pretty much up to their discretion. If it's a more experienced reviewer who can spot these sites a mile away, you will get banned, otherwise you'll be safe for the time being.
Do you really believe that multi-billion dollar company is going to approve a bunch of low-quality sites just because they want to make extra few bucks?
100% yes. I can go on an endless rant about this, but it's Google's job to make money and show increased revenue for their stockholders. Will they let you send bot clicks without repercussion? No. Will they mix in their high quality clicks with low quality? Yes.
Just look at how the new Adwords dashboard is setup for new advertisers. Most of the default settings are specifically set to drive low quality clicks mixed in with high quality. Bing/Yahoo is even worst. The amount of garbage traffic they send your way is ridiculous, and they know it. But they have revenue goals to hit every quarter, and when things are slow, they slip in the garbage traffic. Even Facebook does this to an extent as well. If you're familiar with their ad platform, whenever you start a new campaign, you KNOW to uncheck certain features they keep pushing as a new "feature", because you know it's just garbage traffic.
As an advertiser, I've seen an ungodly amount of garbage sites that were not only approved, but generate a decent amount of clicks. They know app traffic drives majority accidental clicks, yet you have to go through a work-around to get rid of these. They know certain default call-to-action buttons look native to the website and drives accidental clicks, but they let it happen. Remember the arrow button call-to-action they released when adsense arbitrage and slideshow articles was hot? Do you really think that was an accident?
You suggest that every site started really slow, no one has bought traffic and waiting years before the got to a $100 - $1,000 a day?
I work with sites who started with $5k ad budget from day one. No bans.
I'm not suggesting anything. Everything I mentioned was in reference to article arbitrage, since that's what it seems OP is referring to. Any other kind of arbitrage, I think is safe to scale as fast as you want. With article arbitrage, the pattern I've seen is those who scale too fast, end up getting the ban hammer.
! I am glad to meet fellow New Yorker on the forum, there are quite a few New Yorkers on BHW 
