breednet

For my first in a series of random reviews, I have taken some time to conduct a mini, informal experiment on websites that promise free traffic generation. Many of these sites involve you actually “browsing” through their interface, and pausing for anywhere from 8 to 30 seconds before going to the next programmed site. The whole purpose behind this is to accumulate “credits” so you can then join the fun and get someone to see your site in their “browsing” session, and hopefully click on your site, find it remotely interesting, or whatever.

For each of the sites that required “browsing” to generate traffic, I “browsed” for approximately 100 pages, so I could get a feel for rewards, bonuses, experiences, etc.

The following are a list of sites that I reviewed, as well as my unbiased, non-paid opinion:

FreeViral – Ok, so I did a quick Google search and registered here. Stuck a banner and an annoying-as-hell pop-under page, as well as a text link in my blogroll. I get a few hundreds hits a day and 0 referrals in 48 hours. This site is beyond a waste of time, I dare anyone to prove otherwise.

RoyalSurf – I have to start off with a slam on this site – if you are looking for a site that is compliant in IE 3.0 on Windows 95B, you have come to the right place. Seriously, 1996 called and wants its crappy GIF files back. Anyway, the good thing about the browsing experience is new pages load faster (7-9 seconds) than any other site, which was good. When I looked at the Google Analytics results, I only had 4 hits from royalsurf.com referrals. Not impressed with the results. Moving on.

Traffic-Splash.com – Next up is traffic-splash, which made me immediately want to pack up the family truckster and head to a sunny beach in Florida. Too bad it is mid-November. Anyway, I found my second website that I am sure would be able to render just fine in my old Pentium 120 running Windows 95B and either IE 3 or Netscape Navigator 4. The time between pages was almost as good as Royalsurf, so that was impressive. I also got about 12 hits from traffic-splash, so it seemed to work. The GIF file cheesy graphics still make me want to cry, and I thought I heard a Jimmy Buffett song or 2 in a MIDI file in the background.

Trafficswarm – While using the previous two systems, I saw some pages for Trafficswarm, and was thinking “boy these guys must be good.” Well, mixed is more like it. I liked the text link layout of the “browsing” experience, but there is a 20 second wait between clicking links, which is good for allowing pages to load, etc. but bad for building credit. I received about 10 hits from trafficswarm when I let it cut loose on my target site, choosing 3 different URLs (home page and two different articles). Not terribly impressed, moving on still.

TS25.com – Traffic Syndicate 25, ok this looked good from the start. Dead simple registration, easy to naivgate site, very simple and clean layout (no late 90s GIF files, they actually use a random unique number match to move to the next page in the “browsing” session). When you build up credit you can have up to 3 simultaneous traffic campaigns. The hit ratio looked to be the highest from TS25, where I had 53 hits. Wow.

ilovehits.com – this site is stupid, stupid, stupid, and so are you if you waste your time here. Don’t.

startxchange.com – linked with and partners with ilovehits.com. Keep on walking.

Bottom line, all of these programs were pretty lame in my experience. For the time investment, I just did not see the payoff. I am sure there is a payoff if you set up a few accounts and wrote a click bot, but I am sure you would probably get shut down pretty quickly. The traffic generated well over 90% bounce rate across the board (and 100% on some networks), so it is mostly folks just clicking through your site, and certainly not clicking on articles, enjoying your content, clicking ads or buying anything. I really don’t feel like writing a click bot (or using one) for the limited payoff of marginal traffic with 90-100% bounce rate.

I think for my blog and the few hundred hits (less than 1000/day on average) that it gets daily, I am going to stick to working on good content and social networking and social bookmarking through Digg (where I get ~25% of my referral traffic anyway), StumbleUpon and Delicious. I am also going to dramatically change my ads around and probably reduce my ad presence, and make it way more targeted.

Hope you found this helpful.