Why Traffic Exchanges Suck

The theory of a traffic exchange is great- you need traffic, they provide traffic. Signing up for a traffic exchange means you will be getting more traffic all right, but there is no guarantee that any of it will translate into sales. Traffic exchanges make no sales guarantees, and they don't much mention your actually making money after getting this new traffic. So why do people join them?

When signing up with a traffic exchange, you are agreeing to visit other sites in that exchange network. For doing this, you will then get traffic from other members directed to your own site. So, site owners are looking at your site, browsing around, they may see something they like and buy it. Or, they may think your site is a great idea and mention it on their own site. Of course, in reality, it never seems to quite work that way.

Large sites don't have much reason to join traffic exchanges and look at other people's sites like this. Small businesses with fairly new sites do. So guess who joins traffic exchanges? Any advertising you might get on a site from being seen on a traffic exchange is going to be on a small, low budget site, which likely won't bring much traffic your way even if it does happen.

In addition, many traffic exchange systems are set up on a cheesy automatic timer so that you don't have to spend too long looking at any one site in order to get in your quota. The time each site is given is usually less than a minute, giving you such in-depth exposure to those small, beginning websites. Just imagine the business that will come your way from all of that.

Think about your own reasons for wanting to join up with a traffic exchange. Is it to seek out new life and new civilizations? To boldly find new websites and buy lots of stuff from them? Heck no. People want to join because it is cheap, or free, and you don't have to spend much time looking at those other sites in order to bring traffic to your own. So how many of the other guys do you suppose join the exchange to buy things from other people?

Most traffic exchanges work on a credit system- you have to earn credits to get viewers to your site. You earn credits by looking at sites, then those credits are used to send viewers to yours. And the quota is usually not one to one. Sometimes you have to look at two or three sites in order to get one person directed to your site. So, members are going to try to look at as many sites as possible to get their own traffic numbers up. Seeing as many sites as possible, combined with the short times they have to view each site, it is pretty unlikely that any one site will stand out enough to ever return to. So, if you want untargeted traffic for no real reasons, traffic exchanges are terrific. Otherwise, traffic exchanges suck.