There a type of traffic exchange that is worthy of mention, the paid to read email programs, and pay to surf programs. I've found several on the traffic exchanges. They have various payment structures. You can also use your earnings for advertising. This is where you agree to view advertisements for a set amount of time for a fraction of a penny per pageview.
To test their effectiveness as an advertising method, I signed up for a few and worked them in two ways, on some I traded the cash for advertising, others I tried to reach payout. The first one that I signed up for gave between ½ to 1 cent per email, and you had to leave the window open for 30 seconds either way. At 1 cent per link, you could earn 60 cents per hour, at ½ cent per link you earn 30 cents per hour at most, the average hourly earnings was 38 cents due to the ratio of 1 to ½ cent links. Payout was at $25 dollars. I estimated that if I earned everything that this site had to offer on my own, I would reach that $25 dollar mark perhaps every fourth or fifth month due to the daily variance of ad view offers. I reached something like $3 before they closed the site due to the web mistress quitting her job. I was never paid.
Another one I signed up for flooded my spam mail account ( a separate email account which I use to sign up for programs on the internet, if you want to spam me go for it I never read anything in there except for conformation emails anyway. Click Here )l with links where you earned points. There were very few cash paying links. Points could be converted to cash or page views, but it was a miniscule amount, like 100th of a penny per point. This was really sad in my opinion.
There are three services generally advertised in these programs.
Pay Per Click Search Engines
Other paid to read email programs that the advertiser belongs to.
Affiliate programs.
Some of these people even build web pages with nothing but banners of the programs that they belong to in attempts to build their downlines. Others belong to so many of these programs that it's hard to keep track of the ones that they do belong to, so they sign up for what is called rotator services. This is a program where you add in all of your referral links and they will rotate them for you. When a hit comes to that page, one of these referral links is shown either randomly or in order in a small frame in the middle of a midst of advertising banners and text links. I hated these things, they didn't load properly, came with tons of popup's, and just ticked me off whenever I came across one.
As for the effectiveness of the advertising. When I earned a $1.15, on one of these, I could purchase 1000 hits with a payout of 1/10 of a cent per click.
I purchased 1000 hits advertising a really good ebook on how to make money with referral programs. Sold 0.
I purchased 1000 hits to advertise another paid to read email program, There were 3 sign ups from that 1000 hits. 2 of these were eliminated from my referral list a month later due to inactivity. The other one is still on there a year later, and has added two others to my downline for me. Although this is one of the best I've found, there are now, 1 year later, a total of 7 referrals under me earning actively out of aproxamately 71 total signups, others have dwindled due to lack of activity. This program boldbytes.com does pay and I use it for advertising, I earn aprox 1.2 cents a day from my referrals. Payout is $30 dollars every three months or so.
I purchased 1000 hits for an affiliate program, Sales 0 signup's 1, removed for lack of activity a month later. Cash earned from signup's = 0.
It's hard to get quality signup's this way. It's not an effective advertising method. I'm not sure how much money some of these people make, but I would say that if you can earn a dollar a day from your referral list, I would consider you highly successful in these. The time/cost/payoff ratio to getting to that point is just not worth the effort because as soon as the people realize what they actually have to do to get to that point, they are dropped for inactivity..
Many of these also offer small traffic exchanges where you surf to earn hits to your pages. Mostly other programs, I surfed one of these for 40 minutes, at 20 seconds per page view. Then reached the end of what they had to offer. It took a total of 16 days to get those 118 hits.
There are people out there though, who work hard building their downlines to these, get in early and your golden, if the program lasts and actually pays that is. They buy advertising for these sites on other program sites that they belong to, and refer to themelves as "Clickers". The web site owner gets a ton of free advertising that is actually paid for by others, spending their earnings on other PTR sites. However so many end up closing down, after a short run that belonging to any one is as risky as anything I've ever seen. Wise investors realize that the higher the risk, the higher the potential pay off should be, but the payoff is just not there. PayPal has even stopped allowing many of these programs to process payments through the PayPal Service.
This is one article from the Ebook The Bottom Of The Chain In The Traffic Exchange, Available at
http://thebottomofthechain.50webs.com/BottomOfTheChain.html