Traffic exchanges have a long and variable history in the world
of Internet marketing. At times they have been incredible effective. At
other times they have been nothing short of scams. Exchanges of all
stripes exist today, with some of the best hidden behind walls of
reviews and bans.
How Traffic Exchanges Work
In concept, the
traffic exchange is a
brilliant idea. Years ago, when the Internet was young and marketers were well meaning and naïve, they worked very well.
The idea works like this. You have a website, and you want others to
see it. Your friend has a website of their own, and they want others to
see it too. You send your website to your friend and tell them to look
at it, and if they do, you’ll look at their site too. Now scale this up;
instead of you and your friend, you have thousands of marketers with
websites they want seen.
The traffic exchange itself is a central hub that regulates websites
and views. You register for the site, because you want your site to be
viewed by other users. The traffic exchange puts a bit stop sign in
front of you and points towards the pool of other websites already in
the system.
In order to have your site viewed, you need to spend credits.
You earn credits by viewing other websites.
When I talk about a ratio below, that ratio is typically how many views
you need to make before you earn a credit. Most traffic exchanges also
offer you the ability to purchase credits with money, to bypass the
time-consuming process of viewing other pages just to get yours viewed.
The Problem With Traffic Exchanges
In a perfect world, with everyone on the up and up, a traffic
exchange would be a perfectly valid and legitimate way of sharing a
website. You would have webmasters from across the country, in all
niches, sharing their sites. It would be like StumbleUpon; you could
select interests, browse sites that interest you, and all the while earn
credits to have your site added into the rotation.
We don’t live in a perfect world. Someone, somewhere, way back in the
dark ages of the Internet, created a piece of software that would view a
website for them in the background while they did other things. This
would earn them credits for the traffic exchange, which they could then
spend for legitimate views from real users.
They were essentially injecting fake traffic into the rotation and pulling legitimate traffic out.
This grew more and more widespread as people discovered the
technique, bought similar software, and put it to use. The trouble is,
for every user fake browsing, the quality of the traffic from the
exchange drops. If 50% of the users of a traffic exchange are using bots
to browse to earn credits, 50% of the traffic they – and the legitimate
users – receive will be fake traffic. And that’s at a 1:1 ratio. It
gets worse when the exchange requires more views for a credit.
About Manual Exchanges
There are
two types of traffic exchanges; the manual
and the autosurf. Consider the above problem scenario with traffic
exchanges. There are two ways to solve this problem.
The first way to solve the problem is to heavily
regulate the traffic exchange. You would need to sample traffic and
monitor the actions of the people browsing through your network. Any
time you detect a bot, you would need to block that bot, invalidate the
credits earned through the bot, and warn or potentially ban the user
running the bot.
Manual traffic exchanges
take this route.
They heavily enforce ratios, they ban users who use bots, and they
often require a human interface action such as a captcha in order to
prove you’re not a robot doing the browsing. They almost all require a
certain amount of time spent on a given site in turn, in order to
encourage actual usage of the site.
I’ll talk about the other solution to the problem in
a minute; first, though, let’s look at the names that come up
frequently in the world of manual traffic exchanges.
High Quality Manual Exchanges
These exchanges are all on the top side of legitimate, or as close as
possible. They filter their sites to remove malware and malicious
sites, they ban people trying to abuse the system, and they have high
volumes of hits.
- Traffic Monsoon – This exchange has a 2:1 ratio
and a 20-second timer on surfing, but it does allow automatic rotators.
It doesn’t require a login to surf. It’s been steadily growing from
month to month and broke 20 million hits tracked as of June 2015.
- EasyHits4u – This exchange has a
ratio of 1:1 and only a 15-second timer. They allow rotators and don’t
require a login. They’re significantly smaller than Traffic Monsoon,
with only 600,000 tracked hits. As a bonus, they have five referral
tiers for marketers looking to recruit others.
- TE Racing League – This exchange
has a somewhat rocky history, going up and down in hits from month to
month, taking a dive in May. They have a 3:1 ratio but only a 5-second
timer.
- Legacyhits – this exchange has
been holding relatively steady over the last few months, with only a
minor decline in May and June. They have a 10-second timer and do not
require a login, but their ratio is only 2:1. They have nearly 1.5
million tracked hits on average.
- Surfers2u – This exchange has a
4:3 ratio, which is unusual among the higher quality exchanges. It also
does not allow rotators. It doesn’t require a login, at least, and they
have around a quarter million tracked hits on average.
- I Love Hits – This exchange has a
3:1 ratio and a 6-second timer. They allow rotators and have no login
for surging. They have a referral program, but it only has one level, so
the bonus is flat for each referral.
- StartXchange – This exchange has
a 3:1 ratio and a 10-second timer, making it about par for the course.
It allows rotators, has no login, and has tracked over two million hits.
There’s not much that makes it stand out compared to other exchanges.
- TopHits4U – This exchange has a
3:1 ratio and a 10-second timer. Sound familiar? Like StartXchange,
there’s nothing that really sets this network apart from others on this
list.
- Easyhits2u – Another exchange
that has a 2:1 ratio, a 10-second timer, no login, and rotator
permissions. This is the problem with many of these networks; there’s
nothing that makes them stand apart from others on their tier.
- ThumbVu – this exchange has a
3:1 ratio, a 10-second timer, rotators, and all the same as the rest.
The one major difference is that it requires a login if you want to
surf, unusual for the top tier exchanges.
- Tezak Traffic Power – One of
the more originally named exchanges, this one pulls out at the bottom of
the “high quality” list with a 3:1 ratio, an 8-second timer and the
same rotator permission as most of the other networks.
Low Quality Manual Exchanges
I’m not going to go into detail about these exchanges, as you
probably shouldn’t even visit them. In general, they’re all low volume,
with either a
lot of bad traffic or a lot of bots circulating through their networks. Remember, these are just a selection of the hundreds of bad traffic exchanges out there.
- Hit Hiefer
- Surf Central Net
- Firedragon-Hits
- AdsTab
- Global Traffic 4You
- WatersEdgeHits
- Free Web Clicks
- Surfers Traffic Exchange
- Badger Hits
- Lighthouse-Traffic
About Autosurf Exchanges
Now, think back to the problem scenario. Your traffic exchange is
large, it has thousands of users, if not hundreds of thousands. There
are millions of hits flying around every week. It’s impossible for you
to manage the exchange and enforce quality. You could use algorithms,
but algorithms can be beaten, and you don’t have the time, knowledge or
budget to develop them faster than your legion of users can beat them.
Rather than attempt to fight off the bots,
you embrace them.
You remove any text on your site guaranteeing the quality of the
traffic in the exchange. You drop prices on credits and raise ratios to
encourage bot usage. You enable applications that rotate through sites
automatically, changing up user agent and HTTP referrer as they go. You
add a widget that dynamically changes the amount of time the bot spends
on each site, and you virtually remove timers on viewing each site.
This is what an
autosurf
exchange is. You don’t need your users to run a bot; you embed the bot
in your exchange software itself. All the user has to do is hit play,
wait a while, then redeem their credits.
The problem with an autosurf network, of course, is that
all of the traffic coming through it is coming from a bot.
The people using these networks all know that the traffic is bot
traffic, and it’s all very, very hard to use for anything legitimate.
Bot traffic like this can get you booted from programs like Google
AdSense, and most other sources of display ads.
Now, I’m going to list a bunch of autosurf exchanges, some good and
some bad. Before you read on, though, I just want you to remember that
even the best autosurf is still poor quality traffic, and will fare
poorly compared to even bad manual exchanges.
High Quality Autosurf Exchanges
Autosurfs are only good for very specific purposes. You can make
money with them, but you have to have a site set up to use them.
Traditional splash pages and high value but low converting sales don’t
work. You’ll have high traffic volume but low click rates. Plan
accordingly.
- Hitleap comes out on top with the ability to set visits per hour on individual URLs. You can hide the referrer as well.
- Homepage Exchange I rank second with their custom timer. They allow you to convert minutes into cash, and they have a good referral program.
- eBesucher is a high quality site
but it caters exclusively to a German audience. They have good
targeting and a lot of members, if you can appeal to their niche.
- 247AutoHits sounds like a poor
piece of software, but it’s a decent autosurf network with commissions
for referred members who upgrade their accounts.
- Otohits has a custom time and a custom HTTP referrer, which is a lot of control that poor sites don’t give you.
- SmileyTraffic has a 20 second timer and over 170,000 members, so it can produce a lot of volume very quickly.
- WebSyndic is primarily notable for having decent geotargeting, and for having a hybrid English and French audience.
- Twistrix has custom timers and the option to hide the HTTP referrer, though you can’t customize it as you can on some other networks.
- FeelingSurf is a French-oriented
page with a very modern interface, and they give you the option for
unique visitors only, to eliminate unnecessary repeat visits.
- EliteAutosurf is notable only for their weekly contest for referrals, which can award advocates cash prizes.
- GlobalBlaster and GlobalHits
are two networks operated by the same company and are really the same
wide network, so you can sort of access both from one or the other.
Low Quality Autosurf Exchanges
One thing you’ll note about the list I’m about to show you is that they’re
all aimed at foreign countries.
I say this as an American writing to an America-centric audience.
Perhaps these networks are decent for people within their demographics,
but I’m not one of them, so I can’t much test it out.
- CrunchingBT
- 24Besucher
- Auto-Surf.de
- Websurf.cz
- AutoSurf.sk
- Auto-surf.pl
- AutoVisitor
- 360clicks.de
- Lautosurf
- Autosurf.fr
Believe it or not, despite the similar names, they’re not all
run by the same company. They’re just networks that used formulaic
setups on URLs they bought quickly to make sure they had a claim.
How to Use a Traffic Exchange Effectively
With both manual and autosurf exchanges, there’s one big lingering
problem. Remember my analogy likening them to StumbleUpon? Well, it’s
not quite accurate. StumbleUpon has a wide array of interests and topics
for users to browse. There are millions of pages in their database,
categorized by interest and delivered to interested people.
Traffic exchanges may have started out that way, all the way back in
2001, but they have long since decayed. As their reputation fell, it
required more and more knowledge and more tricks to use them
effectively. As the barrier to entry rose, the niches willing to use
them dropped out. These days, the only people really interested in using
a traffic exchange are the people who want to abuse them to make quick
money online. These people have sites typically geared towards making
money online, to help out each other and to make a profit off of their
knowledge.
Therefore, these days, you can only really make a profit out of a traffic exchange, manual or autosurf, by
running a website in a niche geared towards making money online.
It might be about boosting traffic, it might be about running ads, it
might be about traffic exchanges themselves; there are any number of
variants of the niche. The fact is, though, you won’t see cooking blogs
and automobile blogs and mountain climbing blogs in the rotation. The
traffic using the exchange is only interested in getting value out of
it, so the only way to make money from those users is to
cater to their interests; making money out of blogging.
What other tips can you use to optimize your usage of traffic exchanges?
Use a lot of them. One traffic exchange limits you.
Two limits you less. See, each exchange tends to have a surprisingly
small set of active users, so you can run into issues seeing the same
sites more than once. Exchanges typically only count the first unique
view of a day, so it earns you no credits and it does you no good to
encounter the same site twice.
Additionally, most exchanges have a timer you need to exhaust before
you can move on to the next site. If you earn a credit for every three
sites you view, and it takes you 20 seconds to exhaust the timer on each
site, that’s one credit per minute. If you add in a second traffic
exchange with the same statistics and rules, you’re earning two credits
per minute; you just need to have another browser window open for that
other exchange.
To avoid having all of your credits used up by showing your site to
the same people over and over, you can use more than one exchange as
well. Rather than stacking 50 credits on one site, you stack 10 on five
sites. Each site tends to have a different active audience, so you’ll
get more unique views.
As for extracting value from the users browsing your site, use a
splash page. These users aren’t going to bother scrolling down, they
just want to get in and out. You have exactly the size of one browser
window to capture their attention and get them to explore your site
instead of surfing away.
You’re also never going to convert these users into paying for a product from your splash page. Don’t even try. Instead,
try to get them to opt in to a mailing list.
Providing an email in exchange for some free bit of value is a lot more
enticing than exchanging dollars for a product. You can follow up the
opt-in with a sales pitch later.
If you’re lucky, you’ll rack up enough credits throughout your
various exchanges to get a decent number of people browsing your site,
and while they do so, some will become interested. You can explore those
leads at your leisure, and sell them products through force of
personality and salesmanship, rather than through a landing page pitch.
Kenny is an SEM and SEO professional. He uses blogging and content
marketing as a launchpad for small businesses looking to grow their
online presence.
