History of AutoSurfing
Submitted by: Jody Molloy
It would be difficult for anyone to pinpoint exactly when the autosurfing community came to be, however, most trusted and popular industry sources would probably agree that 2.5 to 3 years is about right (up to November 2005).
So far, through a rather tumultuous evolution, the paid autosurfing industry has endured more than its’ fair share of ridicule from sceptics and “mainstream” advertisers. In fairness, traffic exchanges, at least while in their infancy, would never have proven adequate for any business greater than an SME (Small-Medium Enterprise) or the affiliate marketing workforce to utilise as an effective method of marketing.
The Industry was created on the idea of providing a service by which webmasters could “drive” visitors to their sites and thus help increase their search engine rankings based on quantity of visitors (thanks Alexa).
No longer did people have to pay exorbitant amounts of money to get listed on Search Engines or purchase PPC campaigns. Of course, the more alluring the website, the more click-through visitors it will attract.
In theory, this usually translates into a rise in sales providing the rest of ones’ website marketing strategy was working effectively (good layout, text rich, audio, etc) because a visitor actually gets to see what your website looks and sounds like instead of just a description picked up by the engine spiders (bots). It is a much more interactive experience providing very real exposure.
It works too!....By utilising a variety of different traffic exchanges, we managed to get one of our websites listed by all the major search engines (Google, Yahoo etc) inside our first three months of operation.
We’re not too sure how this stacks-up against other sites we might be competing against, but it was certainly on our list of twelve month goals.
In the beginning there was very much an atmosphere of reserved anticipation. It took only six months or so for one “industry-leading” traffic exchange to amass around 10,000 members while other sites with typically smaller numbers of members fought to gain recognition in the face of what might’ve looked like a developing monopoly.
Predictably, the spirit of free enterprise, competition and perhaps a little opportunistic greed, saw some cashed-up members of the first “proven” paid traffic exchange to obtain the script and hosting necessary to open their own paid-traffic exchanges. They were the first to take advantage of the market demand for more opportunities to earn cash for surfing and were largely responsible for giving the industry a much needed exposure boost.
A wise business manoeuvre, one might say. However, the absence of any formal regulatory or governing body, association or union had left a legal loophole the size of the Grand Canyon. This created a virtual cesspool of scam-like Paid-to-surf webmasters. Some went into business with the full intention of collecting members’ upgrade cash and then vanishing soon after while others proved to be poorly organised, highly incompetent and completely devoid of any business management knowledge, much less experience.
The results were most often that the webmaster would become increasingly difficult to contact, much less give his/her members the courtesy of an explanation for the silence. This would be followed by an even quieter exit whereby the webmaster would notify members via email to announce that the site would be offline for “maintenance” or a “server upgrade” and then never make it back to operations.
Some even, after some period of lying low, had the audacity to open another site, in a brazen attempt to steal again from a largely uninitiated but burgeoning autosurf community.
It must’ve been like “shooting fish in a barrel” for them. However, the vigilant nature of the autosurfing community soon prevailed and the perpetrators were eventually exposed as fraudulent scam operators and their details distributed throughout a network of legitimate and successful autosurf webmasters.
The problems, loopholes and hidden clauses that virtually permits this type of behaviour to occur will be examined in a further article about Terms of Service.
The community had recovered confidence when some of those legitimate webmasters neared 12 months in operation. It must’ve been quite a “baptism of fire” for some of the smaller sites as they became targets for hackers, DDOS (dedicated denial of service) attacks, extortionists and a sometimes hostile membership that generally only wanted to generate a reliable source of income.
Webmasters soon realised that there were many hidden costs incurred in operating an autosurf program. More often than not, site policies were geared towards allowing the maximum level of earning capacity for each member as possible, rather than ensuring that enough revenue was being generated and withheld in order to make monthly payout commitments.
The greatest short-coming of most autosurf programs is, and has always been, that they rely too heavily on new members joining with fresh upgrade cash to fund the payouts. This practice skirts dangerously close to the textbook definition of a Ponzi scheme.
When new memberships decrease and payout commitments are growing each month, webmasters must find those innovative ways to market their site to a larger and more responsive audience or tighten their Terms of Service to restrict the earning capabilities of the current membership until such time as revenue increases.
All traffic exchanges write a contingency clause into their Terms of Service, just for the purpose of protecting their income and viability. Again, we’ll examine that in finer detail very soon.
Issues arising from the complexities of dealing with such a large number of autosurf programs and an ever swelling community were gradually addressed during the months following the “Industry’s” birth. More innovative webmasters found ways to channel the collective opinions of the membership into targeted discussion forums and information/evaluation sites about the operational state of autosurf programs and the state of the Industry in general. The birth of the “resistance” or “alliance” had come.
Greater promotion of these forums provided a generally heightened awareness of the ever-present “moral transgressions”. Most often, the uninitiated and inexperienced became easy prey for these cyber-thieves.
However, by the time the community was passing a rather uneasy first anniversary, many founding members had suffered serious financial losses.
It seemed that no amount of research or investigation would ever be able to accurately predict the long-term viability of ANY program. At best, only an “educated guess” was all the justification a disgruntled membership base needed to apply the brakes on fresh cash-upgrades. Even membership growth of many sites slowed to just a trickle.
The second year emerged disastrously with many high-profile programs folding under the weight of a highly expectant membership base (compounding terms being widely utilised to full effect) and the untimely collapse of several larger, higher percentage paying and therefore riskier HYIP’s/MLM’s etc that many PTS webmasters had a tendency to invest members funds into. Predictably, having a “domino effect” on the PTS industry this way caused many members pockets to become deeper.
Yes, as one might expect, a now HIGHLY anxious membership base was now more vigilant than ever with their upgrade cash, however, some adventurous surfers soon fell for the “discounted” upgrade offers made by some webmasters. Some of these “bonuses” were only a final attempt to seize some new upgrade cash before closing their doors without warning. (There is a tip in there somewhere…J)
By half way into the second year, the community had emerged with a greater sense of stability than ever before. The developments of recent months had left many observers with the knowledge of the trials and errors of those that had failed. Easy comparisons were soon being drawn on the most successful autosurf business models as the community continued to strive towards unity and a commitment to the prosperity of all participants.
Now, with new leaders emerging as industry “favourites”, it seems some shine has rubbed off some of the “old guard”. There has even been a gradual move away from the traditional “1% for 365 days” autosurf program model to higher percentage paying (but lesser days of valid upgrade) sites that while on the surface may seem to carry greater risk, but are proving they really are no riskier than traditional models on a community wide basis.
With nearly 500 active programs at the time of authoring this, the Autosurf Industry by most learned accounts, would most likely be considered to be in a prosperous upward trend as popularity gains momentum. Undoubtedly, there will be more turbulent times ahead as the community struggles desperately to gain acceptance, recognition and reputation throughout the Internet whilst working closely with each other to identify, deter and expose those would-be thieves who view the community as easy prey for their larceny.
With this in mind, I feel it is incumbent on ALL members of the community to unite and form a “Union” whereby the interests of all parties are self-governed and disputes legally adjudicated. This will require a MASSIVE communication effort on the part of Web Hosts, Payment Processors, webmasters, surfers and industry observers.
Until such time as this can be achieved AND greater controls are introduced to vastly improve the QUALITY of advertising through autosurfs in the minds of the Internet business community, Paid Autosurfing will continue to be snubbed in favour of methods that are more reliable, flexible and produce greater response rates to a MUCH wider audience.
It would be difficult for anyone to pinpoint exactly when the autosurfing community came to be, however, most trusted and popular industry sources would probably agree that 2.5 to 3 years is about right (up to November 2005).
So far, through a rather tumultuous evolution, the paid autosurfing industry has endured more than its’ fair share of ridicule from sceptics and “mainstream” advertisers. In fairness, traffic exchanges, at least while in their infancy, would never have proven adequate for any business greater than an SME (Small-Medium Enterprise) or the affiliate marketing workforce to utilise as an effective method of marketing.
The Industry was created on the idea of providing a service by which webmasters could “drive” visitors to their sites and thus help increase their search engine rankings based on quantity of visitors (thanks Alexa).
No longer did people have to pay exorbitant amounts of money to get listed on Search Engines or purchase PPC campaigns. Of course, the more alluring the website, the more click-through visitors it will attract.
In theory, this usually translates into a rise in sales providing the rest of ones’ website marketing strategy was working effectively (good layout, text rich, audio, etc) because a visitor actually gets to see what your website looks and sounds like instead of just a description picked up by the engine spiders (bots). It is a much more interactive experience providing very real exposure.
It works too!....By utilising a variety of different traffic exchanges, we managed to get one of our websites listed by all the major search engines (Google, Yahoo etc) inside our first three months of operation.
We’re not too sure how this stacks-up against other sites we might be competing against, but it was certainly on our list of twelve month goals.
In the beginning there was very much an atmosphere of reserved anticipation. It took only six months or so for one “industry-leading” traffic exchange to amass around 10,000 members while other sites with typically smaller numbers of members fought to gain recognition in the face of what might’ve looked like a developing monopoly.
Predictably, the spirit of free enterprise, competition and perhaps a little opportunistic greed, saw some cashed-up members of the first “proven” paid traffic exchange to obtain the script and hosting necessary to open their own paid-traffic exchanges. They were the first to take advantage of the market demand for more opportunities to earn cash for surfing and were largely responsible for giving the industry a much needed exposure boost.
A wise business manoeuvre, one might say. However, the absence of any formal regulatory or governing body, association or union had left a legal loophole the size of the Grand Canyon. This created a virtual cesspool of scam-like Paid-to-surf webmasters. Some went into business with the full intention of collecting members’ upgrade cash and then vanishing soon after while others proved to be poorly organised, highly incompetent and completely devoid of any business management knowledge, much less experience.
The results were most often that the webmaster would become increasingly difficult to contact, much less give his/her members the courtesy of an explanation for the silence. This would be followed by an even quieter exit whereby the webmaster would notify members via email to announce that the site would be offline for “maintenance” or a “server upgrade” and then never make it back to operations.
Some even, after some period of lying low, had the audacity to open another site, in a brazen attempt to steal again from a largely uninitiated but burgeoning autosurf community.
It must’ve been like “shooting fish in a barrel” for them. However, the vigilant nature of the autosurfing community soon prevailed and the perpetrators were eventually exposed as fraudulent scam operators and their details distributed throughout a network of legitimate and successful autosurf webmasters.
The problems, loopholes and hidden clauses that virtually permits this type of behaviour to occur will be examined in a further article about Terms of Service.
The community had recovered confidence when some of those legitimate webmasters neared 12 months in operation. It must’ve been quite a “baptism of fire” for some of the smaller sites as they became targets for hackers, DDOS (dedicated denial of service) attacks, extortionists and a sometimes hostile membership that generally only wanted to generate a reliable source of income.
Webmasters soon realised that there were many hidden costs incurred in operating an autosurf program. More often than not, site policies were geared towards allowing the maximum level of earning capacity for each member as possible, rather than ensuring that enough revenue was being generated and withheld in order to make monthly payout commitments.
The greatest short-coming of most autosurf programs is, and has always been, that they rely too heavily on new members joining with fresh upgrade cash to fund the payouts. This practice skirts dangerously close to the textbook definition of a Ponzi scheme.
When new memberships decrease and payout commitments are growing each month, webmasters must find those innovative ways to market their site to a larger and more responsive audience or tighten their Terms of Service to restrict the earning capabilities of the current membership until such time as revenue increases.
All traffic exchanges write a contingency clause into their Terms of Service, just for the purpose of protecting their income and viability. Again, we’ll examine that in finer detail very soon.
Issues arising from the complexities of dealing with such a large number of autosurf programs and an ever swelling community were gradually addressed during the months following the “Industry’s” birth. More innovative webmasters found ways to channel the collective opinions of the membership into targeted discussion forums and information/evaluation sites about the operational state of autosurf programs and the state of the Industry in general. The birth of the “resistance” or “alliance” had come.
Greater promotion of these forums provided a generally heightened awareness of the ever-present “moral transgressions”. Most often, the uninitiated and inexperienced became easy prey for these cyber-thieves.
However, by the time the community was passing a rather uneasy first anniversary, many founding members had suffered serious financial losses.
It seemed that no amount of research or investigation would ever be able to accurately predict the long-term viability of ANY program. At best, only an “educated guess” was all the justification a disgruntled membership base needed to apply the brakes on fresh cash-upgrades. Even membership growth of many sites slowed to just a trickle.
The second year emerged disastrously with many high-profile programs folding under the weight of a highly expectant membership base (compounding terms being widely utilised to full effect) and the untimely collapse of several larger, higher percentage paying and therefore riskier HYIP’s/MLM’s etc that many PTS webmasters had a tendency to invest members funds into. Predictably, having a “domino effect” on the PTS industry this way caused many members pockets to become deeper.
Yes, as one might expect, a now HIGHLY anxious membership base was now more vigilant than ever with their upgrade cash, however, some adventurous surfers soon fell for the “discounted” upgrade offers made by some webmasters. Some of these “bonuses” were only a final attempt to seize some new upgrade cash before closing their doors without warning. (There is a tip in there somewhere…J)
By half way into the second year, the community had emerged with a greater sense of stability than ever before. The developments of recent months had left many observers with the knowledge of the trials and errors of those that had failed. Easy comparisons were soon being drawn on the most successful autosurf business models as the community continued to strive towards unity and a commitment to the prosperity of all participants.
Now, with new leaders emerging as industry “favourites”, it seems some shine has rubbed off some of the “old guard”. There has even been a gradual move away from the traditional “1% for 365 days” autosurf program model to higher percentage paying (but lesser days of valid upgrade) sites that while on the surface may seem to carry greater risk, but are proving they really are no riskier than traditional models on a community wide basis.
With nearly 500 active programs at the time of authoring this, the Autosurf Industry by most learned accounts, would most likely be considered to be in a prosperous upward trend as popularity gains momentum. Undoubtedly, there will be more turbulent times ahead as the community struggles desperately to gain acceptance, recognition and reputation throughout the Internet whilst working closely with each other to identify, deter and expose those would-be thieves who view the community as easy prey for their larceny.
With this in mind, I feel it is incumbent on ALL members of the community to unite and form a “Union” whereby the interests of all parties are self-governed and disputes legally adjudicated. This will require a MASSIVE communication effort on the part of Web Hosts, Payment Processors, webmasters, surfers and industry observers.
Until such time as this can be achieved AND greater controls are introduced to vastly improve the QUALITY of advertising through autosurfs in the minds of the Internet business community, Paid Autosurfing will continue to be snubbed in favour of methods that are more reliable, flexible and produce greater response rates to a MUCH wider audience.
posted by vincent at 3:00 AM
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