SE Conspiracy

From time to time, I test various methods of driving traffic to my site as a jump start.

In this case, I wanted to promote my forum, “Get Paid Hwy” (visit site) to the GPT or “Get Paid To…” community. Since Bux.to has an 887 alexa rank and touts incredible traffic related to “Paid to Click” traffic, I figured this would be very relevant traffic.

So, as always, I began by doing some research online. Despite a few posts in forums that bux.to didn’t pay them, there was little feedback. In most cases, they eventually reported being paid. However, from the advertising side, there was little to nothing to be found. I would be basically shooting in the dark on this one.

Although, I never advertise anything without setting up tracking and testing in various ways to make sure my purchase was worthwhile. That way, I know whether or not to use them again. In this case, I was using AWStats to verify the hits and referrer. I had two webmaster friends outside of the United States to help me verify that my ad was showing to members inside their system.

I bought two packages to test:

• 10,000 premium members (members who upgraded) at $179 and
• 2,500 regular members at $46.75

Here’s the screenshot of payment from my paypal account:

I started the 10,000 premium member campaign on the 28th, and that seemed to go fairly well. The visitors were coming in and showed in AWStats and in my forum stats. However, not one single sign-up out of 1,300+ visitors does seem odd. We had four(4) sign-ups, but the one I asked said she found us through “Free Ad Planet.” Since we have a very high conversion rate on sign-ups, I was a little suspicious but figured I would give the benefit of the doubt.

I figured not all of their members would read English but maybe I could get a boost by buying the 2,500 regular member option. So, I did that.

At first, I was shocked that my server began to crash shortly after my ad was approved. “Ok,” I thought, “they definitely do send some massive traffic …and quickly.” So, I quickly moved to shut down unnecessary services and sites on that server to dedicate more resources to the forum. That seemed to help, but the site was still slow because Apache was showing 250 simultaneous requests and more coming in constantly.

At any rate, once I got things under control, I asked my webmaster friend in Hungary to go ahead and log in to bux.to and go to “Surf Ads” to see if my ad was showing for him. As always, I asked him to make sure he cleared his cookies, cleared his cache, and opened a new browser. I nearly flipped when he told me the bux.to site wouldn’t come up for him. And, I nearly flipped again when he said another tab opened with “http://www.get-paid-hwy.com” in it. What’s odd about that was that I never told this webmaster friend which of my sites I was promoting. He sent me the following screenshot:

It’s kind of tough to see in that view, so here’s a zoomed in shot:

Whenever I went to the site, I would get the site without any popup. I asked my other webmaster friend in Peru to visit the site and he did not see any popup but said the site was VERY slow.

The bux.to site was very fast for me. So, it would seem that we were hitting two different servers, perhaps. That is just speculation but it would explain why foreigners were getting timeouts or extreme delays in loading while I could load the site instantly.

It would make sense then that they were driving massive amounts of traffic to their site to boost their Alexa and traffic ranking and then opening up pop-ups for certain foreign (probably Eastern Bloc and Asian) countries who could not even know what they were looking at anyway. That way, bux.to got the credit for the traffic while we got visitors in our log but whom we could never convert. Nice.

So, you can bet I will be demanding a refund immediately. Why?

Well, here’s what is going on:

1. Whenever you make a purchase for regular members, they purchase a ton of foreign traffic ultra-cheap
2. They pour that traffic into their site (hoping some will join) to boost their traffic stats
3. They redirect a pop-up that opens up the purchaser’s site
4. Since the poor sap who bought the traffic is most likely in a country not seeing the pop-up, they would never be the wiser and they will see all the hits and simply wonder why no one joined or signed up

So, my advice is to stay away from Bux.to for buying traffic. In fact, this is most likely the type of scam being run by most of the “buy traffic” websites. So, the moral is definitely: “Buyer Beware!”

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One Response to “Buying Traffic - Case Study - Bux.to”

1. Product of the System » Blog Archive » Fraud, Fraud, Fraud Says:
   January 5th, 2008 at 2:58 am

   [...] to time and I test different sites to see if they perform. In most cases, they are one of those buy traffic scams, but sometimes the advertising does actually pay off. However, with several of my recent purchases [...]

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