Traffic Exchanges: Worth the Time to Advertise Your Site or Not?

Banner Exchange websites offer automatically and/or manually rotated advertised websites in one's web browser that you view in order to gain credits. Basically, you sign up for a free account, then in the members section of their website you can view a website, then, after a certain amount of time, you click a button to view the next website. Members earn credits for each site that they view, which can then be used to advertise their own sites to other members. They will see your site, just like you were able to see other sites as they were rotating. If you have the money to spend, and do not want to take the time to view all of those websites to gain credits, you can buy credits. How many credits you get per dollar (usually a minimum limit of $10) is based off the site's policies. When advertising, usually 1 credit = 1 view. So if you have 10 credits, your site will be displayed to others 10 times. It could be 10 unique people, or one person viewing it 10 times, or any mixture of the two.

Is it worth it?

No! WORTHLESS! 99% of all people who sign up for these sites will never look at your site or any other site. These sites force the user to look at sites for a minimum of 10 seconds (normally, can go up to 30 seconds), But during that time, the user isn't looking at the sites. They are changing to a different Traffic Exchange site to get multiple credit-incomes or just starring at the timer, waiting to click the next button for more credits.

Any dangers to be aware of?

Yes! If you have advertisements on your site (like adsense), the more hits on your site from the same I.P. Address, the more likely your ad company will ban your account. This is called fake visits, and frowned upon by most companies, including almost all search engines (www.google.com, and www.yahoo.com are two of the, and the most used search engines available).

Any benefit from these sites?

They can have some benefit in certain situations (none-comes to mind). In less than half an hour of using four of these sites simataously, I had gotten over 50 visits added to my site's counter. Of those 50, nine of them were unique. I doubt any of those nine had actually looked at any thing on my site, including the pictures of dragons, but it did add a few numbers to my counter. I guess I could use the information I grabbed from their computers in research, or to better advance my site. Their I.P.'s browser types, OS versions, and several other tid bits. Nothing that id difficult to get any where else, without spending all that time clicking on links to 'go-to-the-next-site' situation.