Traffic Exchanges and Mini-Hubs

Manual Traffic-Exchanges

I have been testing "Traffic-Exchange" programs for years now. Over at Net Marketing Forum they love the things, but with a proviso: it is the "manual" ones that they like; they have tended to denigrate "autosurf" ones.

So anyway, I tried them and sure enough they work. They seem to work best for obtaining free signups. Trying to directly promote things that folks have to pay for seems to be a rather wasteful expenditure of "precious" page-exposures. Get folks signed up free first, then worry about "converting" them once you have them.

Thus what I have been running on the exchanges is what I refer to as "minihubs". Others refer to them as "downline builders" but my experimental ones are mini compared to such comprehensive hubs as Michael Russell's M.P.A.M. (MPAM: Massive Passive Advertising Machine). My experimental "minihubs" are simple hacks of Mage Software's MLM Manager version 1.2, as modified by Mage Software for Nick Martin's "Special Edition", which I had been in the process of prototyping for a client who seems to have moved on to something else (I am not sure what).

The prototype is still mostly full of the traffic-exchanges that it came pre-stocked with, or at least those that have survived the test of time. (I have not so much as looked at it in many months, maybe well over a year, though maybe less than two years; the things are kind of "set and forget"). For my mini-hub experiments I chopped it down considerably to make a hopefully much less daunting one: Makemoney Knotwork's Free Viral Money Generator.

As I write, the VMG is the central minihub of a growing family of minihubs, as I branched out with Goddess Knotwork's Free Viral Karma Generator followed over time by various other niche-targetted minihubs. (All of them so far, except Adult Knotwork's Free Viral Traffic Generator, can be found inside the VMG.)

These work rather nicely, a kind of "glorified email-capture page", glorified in that they do not merely capture an email address but actually provide a "member's area" and a forward-looking set of activities for members to progress into. Initially the novelty of them was probably a big factor because back then everyone and their gameboy had seen MPAM countless times and various other hubs containing a daunting number of programs came (and, in some cases, went) but I call these minihubs for a reason: they are mini! They don't present a huge number of programs for folks to sign up to. So they might be particularly appealling to folks who are new to it all and not already used to signing up for umpteen separate programs. Also they are traffic-building downline-builders, which gives them a tendency toward snowballing. They generate traffic which is fed back into them to sign up more people who go on to generate more traffic producing more signups and so on.

Auto Traffic-Exchanges

Then I moved on to testing "autosurf" exchanges. I almost made a minihub for them but ouch, thank about the bandwidth usage compared to the signup ratio! I decided not to risk using more bandwidth than a signup might turn out in the long run to be worth, so went with a third-party downline-builder for that. (Don't bother, unless you figure you can make much better use of it than I did. I only run it in autosurf exchanges and don't bother running plain old autosurfs at all presently as I have moved on to testing the latest wave of autosurf innovation... stay tuned, I will get to them.)

Paid-To-Surf Traffic-Exchanges

Somewhere along the line someone came up with the "bright idea" (sarcasm to be added by the reader, or not; it is up to you) of paying people to surf.

I didn't pay much attention to that, the pay is usually very low and although some of the exchanges I have used have been of that variety I always surfed for credits (display to other surfers of URLs of my own choice) myself and didn't really notice any big difference performance-wise between manual exchanges and manual paid-to-surf exchanges other than the amount of attempted click-fraud they seem to attract. (But how hard the admin fought against click-fraud was probably an important factor.)

That brings us up to just a few months ago, when I started testing the latest "bright idea"...

Paid-To-Autosurf Traffic-Exchanges

The latest wave of paid-to-autosurfs seem potentially characterisable as "ponzified" autosurfs. Take a look for yourself.

They seem poised to maybe bring some attention to the distinction between games (including simulations, including simulations played using "real money") and a classic prototypical fraud known as a Ponzi or a Ponzi Scheme.

It seems obvious to many that educating people about classic prototypical fraudulent schemes has potential merit. What might not be so obvious to some is whether or not education by means of simulations/games is educational or (at least from some possibly extreme points of view) defensible, especially if the simulation/game is played with "real money" to "make it more interesting" (as the saying goes).

So quite apart from whether this breed of autosurf-exchanges is effective as a means of advertising some folks might see other concerns which might even seem more important than whether the surfers actually respond well to the advertising that they are being "paid to autosurf". (For example "are they being paid?")

There are a number of sites that purport to monitor whether various admins of various paid-to-do-something sites do actually pay; that is not what I am trying to find out. Just a few days ago I happened upon a third-party downline-builder that includes a Top Ten of Paid-to-Autosurf Programs.

I have not even checked yet whether each and every one of the so-called top ten is in fact plainly described as a simulation of a ponzi, rather than being fraudulently described as not being a ponzi or (fraudulently or not) being described incorrectly.

That is, I do not yet know whether any of them are ponzi schemes, nor whether any of those which plainly by their own description fit a ponzi model have the key feature which distinguishes fraud from open honest descriptions of the actual rules by which a game or simulation is actually performed/played/run. I have, however, noticed that there are a few that do not pay members who have not put in any money ("upgraded"). Those might be the most likely candidates for the label "ponzi" because the basic prototypical ponzi is, as far as I am aware as I write, for paying participants only.

The way the test is run is to promote the downline-builder using the type of traffic-exchange that is to be tested. Thus I run this one in the ("ponzified"?) autosurfs that it contains. A nice side-effect of that procedure is that I am promoting it to people who are already "into" programmes of that type.

The reason why I selected this particular downline-builder is that it also contains manual-surf exchanges and even some of the classic traffic-building downline-builders of the manual-surf field: MPAM, Profit Rally and Joe Shmo 200. Thus if indeed people do sign up for stuff while paid-to-autosurfing it might serve (one can always hope) as a lifeline extended to any "victims" that might be out there someplace in the paid-to-autosurf field, inviting them into the possibly more productive waters of the free manual surf genre.

It seems probable that least some of the paid-to-autosurf programs inside the "SurfDownline" hub/downlinebuilder operate along the lines of a ponzi, but how many of them tell potential members something that amounts to "we are a simulation of a ponzi, the key difference between us and a ponzi is the fact that there is no fraud involved (we are not pretending that we do not operate the way we do; we are telling you how we are operating and we are in fact operating in the way described)" I do not yet know. Perhaps you might accompany me on that yet-to-be-undertaken investigation?

(Yes, that is an invitation to comment! Go ahead, comment! I will end this post here to give you a chance to go look at the things for yourself and see what you think.)

-MarkM-