Is buying traffic a real thing?

[Bobson]

I see these websites offering to get you 10,000, 30,000, even up to 100,000 unique hits(visitors) to your site for small amounts of money, are they for real? and how do you know if they are actually sending real visitors to your site?


have any of you guys ever bought that kind of traffic?

[Mike]

They usually do send the traffic, but none of it is targetted.

Also it is against most advertising companies TOS to have 'fake' traffic.

[Kyle]

I'd bet a lot of these traffic packages involve lots of popups...
Imagine if a visitor comes to your site through a popup. And then, your site has popups of its own. And those popups are advertising packages that have been sold to people who signed up for those 10,000 visitor traffic packages.

[incka]

100,000 uniques for $99 means 100 CPMs of arround $5 from fast click (popunder)... meaning $500 - $100 = $400.

Good show!

[Mike]

You get better results with fastclick I would have thought.

[Chris]

They could also often be machines.

[incka]

And they might have popup blockers on - Like google toolbar...

[Zboyet]

I have had very little success with buying traffic. The quality sucks. Either they close the site on the front page or if you are lucky they take a quick look around before they leave and never return.

[I, Brian]

I presume most "bought traffic" is nothing more than bots.