Why Paid To Promote Websites Ban Auto-Surfs

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Apart from the fact that auto-surfs only inflate traffic, which is actually good for your Alexa rankings, they are poison to any ptp program. I created a program myself some time ago & I was quick to discover that Auto-Surfs had to be banned. Initially, I encouraged it! My system was set up to track & deny all repeat visits by the same ip in a 24 hour period. So regardless of people repeatedly clicking on the same link over & over again, my anti-cheat system detected it all & denied those users from gaining ill-gotten commission. I must admit that my program was pretty small... so I was paying for limited tracking & therein lies the heart of the problem. I had a limit of 500,000 tracking requests per month & a database of over 200 users. Most users used manual surfs to promote my site & on average, each individual would deliver 50 visits per day or about 10,000 unique views per day. This equates to roughly 300,000 unique visits per month! In effect, less than 500,000 tracking requests are used every month to handle this scenario. Soon after I noticed some affiliates were receiving massive amounts of hits to their link, but over 90% of them were being denied! At first, I laughed at them for thinking they could fool me & my robust anti-cheat system, however, upon further investigation, I realized that they weren't actually cheating, but simply utilizing Auto-Surf traffic! Since I had nothing in my TOS against it, I continued to allow it. All in all, there were about 11 people using it. They were delivering an average of about 4,000 hits each per day & about 200 clicks were unique. (Pretty pathetic, huh?) Now you do the math... 4,000 hits by 11 users = 44,000 daily hits (on average) That's just under 50,000 tracking requests per day. This means that those 11 members alone could single handedly use all 500,000 requests in roughly 10 days! Remember, there were many other participants using up the requests as well. Anyways, within the 1st week of that particular month, I ran out of available tracking requests & my affiliate program came to a standstill & it made a total mess of things... for example, I had to pay for additional requests by upgrading with the tracking software company. Apart from that, I had a support nightmare, since folks who were accustomed to checking their statistics update in "real-time" got the shock of their lives when it stopped tracking their clicks as well as the demands for compensation! Talk about a Nightmare... Either way the problem was solved by simply banning all auto-surf traffic as soon as it was detected! And that's the true reason that PTP sites ban Auto-Surf traffic! So... if you don't know, now you know! PS - You're probably wondering what site it is, but I'm not going to share that with you. LOL! BTW, it was an old PTR site which I sold a long,long time ago in a galaxy far, far away! Cheerios.