While pondering about my next blog post, I started reminiscing about the good old days, the days when most websites weren’t lost in a saturated market, SEO (search engine optimisation) was simpler and Google traffic was more and less a given.

Lets now whizz back 20 years to when I had just started out on the WWW.

Online Marketing was much cheaper back then, with plenty of free ways to increase web traffic. One popular method used by webmasters was Click Exchanges.

I was one of those webmasters, desperate to increase my visitor count (also known as hits).

My first website I ever built was called funattack.co.uk and as money wasn’t plentiful back then, I was always on the lookout for cost effective ways to increase website traffic, with Click Exchanges being one of the methods I adopted right from the start.

Funattack.co.uk has been dead for around 15 years, but when I decided to write this post I registered the domain again again, simply for nostalgic reasons.

Click Exchange – A Brief Explanation

For those of you who don’t know what click exchanges are, let me briefly explain.

Click Exchanges come from a family of early marketing platforms called Traffic Exchanges, others included banner exchanges, exit exchanges and link exchanges.

The basic concept of being a member of a click exchange platform was visiting other members sites in exchange for them visiting yours. The exchange UI (user interface) would deliver one member site after another to your browser.

A footer or header bar would show a count down time (normally set at 10 seconds) once the timer had reached zero you could click an icon and advance to the next site.

For every site you visited and stayed for the minimum 10 seconds would earn you a credit and each credit could be redeemed for traffic back to your own site.

The idea was a simple one, while you were sitting there tapping your fingers waiting for the 10 seconds to expire you would take a look around the site, signup or purchase something or even sign their ‘Visitors Book’ (only the old would remember doing that)

Boring as it sounds and boring as it was, many a late & cold night I, like thousands of others would sit hunched over their computer screens visiting site after site, after site.

Did Click Exchanges Work?

High bounce rates, low conversion rates, but completely free traffic. Overall for me it didn’t work out, but that could have also been down to my site being quite basic with amateurist content, so who really knows.

Most people that used this type of marketing were ‘recruiters’ who’s web sites were simply there to encourage others to join an affiliate or pyramid scheme, all they had to achieve was generating form fills, with all the hard selling done after, so maybe for these types of sites it would have been a good platform.

But any website selling a tangible product would have been wasting their time.

In terms of conversions, I could only make an educated guess and say that conversions were miniscule. I was a member of two of the biggest providers, iLoveClicks.com and ClickThru.net and I didn’t generate anything worthwhile from either.

(I tried to find logos for the two mentioned Exchanges on Google but couldn’t find then anywhere)

How Did Click Exchanges Generate Revenue

Owning a click exchange could be a good earner back in the day, with three main revenue streams available to the lucky owners. First off there was banner advertising, a prominent spot on the header and footer bar next to the timer, stared at by thousands of people a day.

A unique opportunity for potential advertisers due to the fact each banner display would remain in front of a person for at least ten seconds a time.

The second revenue was generated by selling website visits. Members and non-members could skip the need of surfing other members sites by purchasing a credit bundle, these credits were them used to pay for, rather than earn traffic. A good earner for the Exchange.

The final and most lucrative way these guys made money was by using the details of their members and captive audience to send targeted paid for email marketing offers.

I was quite friendly with the two guys who used to run ILoveClicks.com and at one stage they were earning $10,000 per month easily.

The Cheats Get in On The Action

It wasn’t long before the cheats got in on the action and once that happened it was the start of the end. Some clever sod designed an automated surfer which would replicate human interactions by waiting 10 seconds and then clicking on > NEXT.

They could make 1000’s of credits by running these programs on multiple browsers and accounts 24/7.

Don’t get me wrong, the exchanges kept beefing up their security by adding extra safe guards, but then the scammers would release a new program to get around them. Once this started to happen webmasters would start to distrust the traffic they were receiving, due to a majority being fake surfers.

What now for Traffic Exchanges?

A quick Google search show some still exist, but I haven’t dug any deeper to make a fair judgement of how they work now. Maybe I’ll do a follow-up post after some further investigating.

Why Not Share Your Experiences

If you have used a traffic exchange platform or thinking of using one then I would love to hear how you got on, i’d also welcome any feedback on this post, good or bad.