The Who's Who Of The Traffic Exchange World!

A traffic exchange is a type of website on the Internet, which provides a service for webmasters to exchange traffic. Similar to the autosurf programs, although usually traffic exchanges use a manual rotation.

Traffic exchange sites, usually, receive submissions of websites. The person who submitted the website then has to browse other member sites on the exchange program to earn credits, which in return offer their sites to be viewed by other members through the surf system. This increasing the number of visitors to all the sites involved.

Exchanges generally enforce a 2-to-1 or 4-to-1 credit ratio, meaning members earn 0.5 or 0.25 in credit for visiting one member site, and each credit is translated to one page view for them. This ratio can often be upgraded to better ratios such as 1-to-1, by becoming a paying member to the traffic exchange site.

So, website owners would visit other sites through the exchange's surf system and get more traffic back to their own sites. As the viewers are all website owners or operators, it is possible that some of them might find certain member sites interesting and hopefully make note of them on their own sites, sending more free traffic their way. Most traffic programs also have a time limit when members are browsing, ranging from 10 seconds to 60 seconds. Some also use of captcha to ensure user interaction; some exchange programs let members browse without manually clicking, automatically moving on to the next site in rotation once the time limit is up, such methods are called autosurf.

Almost all traffic exchange programs are free, but many of them offer better features to paid members and allow them to buy credits for more traffic. Almost all traffic exchange programs encourage users to build their own referral networks, which would in turn help the referrers gain more credits. For example, when a referred member receives credits through browsing, the referrer would get a small portion of the credits earned.

Most of the time traffic exchange programs are used by small business owners and/or marketers who want free advertising or need a low-budget advertisement campaign. Some say that usefulness of at least some of these programs is doubtful, as many people simply forget sites once the time limit is up as they are only interested in promoting their own site. Also, a small number of users may just purchase credits because of their more often than not low price.