Paid Traffic Sites – A Scam

It seems that at least 3 times a day I see another traffic site for sale on sitepoint (yes i nofollowed that)

If you’re not familiar with a “traffic site” it’s quite a simple concept. The website offers to sell a certain amount of visitors for a price. The one I linked is selling 100 visitors for $3.

Another site that was sold by the same seller (this one is jvisits.com) was offering 3000 visitors for $2. That seemed like an incredible deal to me, so I went and did it. In fact, I did it for 2 sites. I did it for one major site that gets lots of traffic, and another site that got no traffic.

The first site I sent their traffic to was already receiving a few hundred visits per day. Within 24 hours I was sent a link to etracklive.com to check the status of my “visits.” A few hours later it showed over 1000 visitors to this site – however my daily total visitors according to analytics was only 850 – and google adsense showed less than 1000 impressions for that day.

Being skeptical of google tools, I changed the code on the 2nd site to simply open a text file, increment the number in it by 1 and close it. It’s a simple 1999 style web counter but it should have done the job here – and it did. The site was showing 1400 visitors, yet my simple text file showed about 45.

So, did they actually send me visitors? Yes and no.

What most likely happens here is that they’re re-directing expired domain names or using popunders. In the case of popunders they’re probably counting a “visit” as soon as their popunder code launches. Since most browsers now can block these popunders, it’s most likely that nobody was ever seeing my site. Those that did see it most likely closed the popup window before my adsense or analytics code launched.

Are these visitors valuable? Only if you’ve got CPM ads – but with most CPM rates averaging around $0.25 there’s no way to make these services profitable.

So why are so many of these sites for sale on sitepoint? Simple: they all use the same reseller. That’s who’s selling them – and why not? Their business model seems to revolve around cranking out templated sites and selling them on the cheap to “new business owners.”

4 comments May 8th, 2009