“Auto-surfing” is a form of online advertising that purportedly generates advertising revenue for companies that want to increase traffic to their websites. The premise behind auto-surfing is that companies that advertise on the Internet are willing to pay to increase traffic to their web sites. These companies hire an auto-surf firm or “host,” which in turn pays individual web surfers to view certain websites on an automatically rotating basis. The more sites the individual visits, the more money he or she stands to earn.

While auto-surfing may sound easy and appealing — and risk-free — there can be a hitch. Some auto-surf programs require their surfers to pay to participate, although perhaps not initially. When you first sign up to auto-surf, the firm might assign a limited number of sites for you to visit and pay you accordingly. Once you’ve made a modest amount of money, the firm might encourage — or even require — you to purchase a “membership” so that you can maximize your earnings. The program will promise high — often double or triple digit — returns on your investment in the program, often within days or weeks of joining.

The line you’ll hear is that the more you click, the more you collect. But the reality is that any scheme that requires you to pay to participate — and promises handsome rewards in no time at all for little to no effort on your part — bears many of the hallmarks of a “Ponzi” or pyramid scheme. These schemes look deceptively legitimate because the fraudsters behind them typically use money coming in from new recruits to pay off early stage investors. But eventually the pyramid will collapse when it gets too big. It’s simply not possible to “rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul” forever.

The SEC warns investors to be wary of any sort of “get rich scheme quick” scheme — and to be especially leery of opportunities that require you to pay to play. Before you pay a dime to make extra cash in your spare time, be sure to do a little due diligence:

• If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Compare promised yields with current returns on well-known stock indexes. Any investment opportunity that claims you’ll get substantially more could be highly risky — and that means you might lose money.
• Check out the company before you invest. Contact the secretary of state where the company is incorporated to find out whether the company is a corporation in good standing. Also call your state securities regulator to see whether the company, its officers, or the promoters of the opportunity have a history of complaints or fraud. If a supposedly upright business lists only a P.O. box, you’ll want to do a lot of work before sending your money!
• Steer Clear of Testimonials. Watch out if the company’s promotional materials, contain “testimonials” from supposedly satisfied customers, especially if all the “testimonials” are full of praise.
• “Guaranteed returns” aren’t. Every investment carries some degree of risk, and the level of risk typically correlates with the return you can expect to receive. Low risk generally means low yields, and high yields typically involve high risk. If your money is perfectly safe, you’ll most likely get a low return. High returns represent potential rewards for folks who are willing to take big risks. Most fraudsters spend a lot of time trying to convince investors that extremely high returns are “guaranteed” or “can’t miss.” Don’t believe it.

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They claim their system works by buying expired domain names with regular visitors. They then either resell them or use them to send visitors to you. These domain names had a previous website on them that fits into various targeted categories, they then redirect that traffic to your website. In principle it sound like an interesting idea. If for example, Jack was looking for a domain name on domiansareus.com and you had picked ‘domain names’ as a category, then he would be redirected from domainsareus.com to your website.

Of course this will either result in Jack being surprised or disappointed about ending up on a different site or he may well stick around for a while and see what you have to offer. In some ways it almost seems like false advertising although Jack does still end up at a relevant web site, just not the one he thought he was going to. In our experience of purchasing dozens of newly expired names it is very rare we ever found one with any residual traffic. The main reason for this is the 90 day period from when a domain expires to when it is available for sale. This time normally means all Alexa ranking and any traffic has long since gone elsewhere. The only way this whole system could work is if you were able to redirect traffic the instant a domain expires and not when it is available for sale.

Another flaw in the system is that if the visitor goes to the original site address e.g domainsareus.com more than once then there is no guarantee that he will see your website a second time.

To help with this review we bought a package from bettervisitors and set up at least three different ways of tracking on the site so we could be sure of catching every viewing.

To begin with we have to say that their website is a good quality well designed site that we had no difficulty using. Our orders were placed and complete in a matter of moments and all we had to do was wait for the flood of visitors to start. It took about 24 hours and it is our understanding this is while they check your site to make sure everything is in order. In the meantime we were sent the url for yourtrafficserver.com which is where you can view the stats of the traffic they send you including the ip addresses.

According to the statistics on yourtrafficserver.com we received all the traffic we ordered evenly divided over the period of one month which is exactly what the FAQ told us would happen. Unfortunately this is where we differ from what we were told by bettervisitors.com and what all our other ways of tracking told us. We found that on average for the first week we received about 25% of the visitors they claimed were sent. After the first week this dropped to even less until a couple of days we received hardly a hit despite yourtrafficserver.com telling us a different story.

The traffic was always sent in a burst that lasted about an hour so for a few days we sat there and monitored the website in real time via a direct backdoor connection. Once again we were unable to see anywhere near the quantity of visitors that yourtrafficserver.com claimed. We checked all the logs and visitor trackers we had set up and they all agreed with our manual observations.

The other thing that concerned us a lot were the details in the log kept by yourtrafficserver.com itself. The one thing that struck us as very strange was that in a world where Firefox has about 15 – 20 % of the browser market, our visitors were 99% Firefox users. I do not know if this is something to do with the way they redirect the traffic or just a strange quirk.

You can draw your own conclusions from our experience and we are certainly not saying to avoid them. We just want to point out that we were disappointed but not surprised in the results. We have had better results and better conversions from auto surf programs.
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