Review:

Traffic^X

by Joshua Reimer

September 06, 1999

When I first saw Traffic^X (then the Internet Traffic Exchange), I was a little doubting. But now I realize that it is one of the best exchanges on the Internet.

They are continually coming up with innovative new features. What made them famous was being the first (and still the only one, to my knowledge) that trades click throughs instead of impressions. That feature has worked extraordinarily well for me.

However, more than that I appreciate their button sized banner feature. It is such a simple feature, but it has given me many extra visitors that I would otherwise have missed! Instead of trading huge, often ugly 468x60 ad banners, you have the choice of trading small 88x31 button ads! These ads take up a fraction of the space that the larger banners hog, saving you valuable screen space, however they perform remarkably well! I ran their button ads on my site for a number of weeks (and still would, except that I have paying sponsors right now), and they generated a .45% CTR!

Other great features of Traffic^X include targeting, filtering (filter out your competitor's banners), screened sites (no inappropriate sites will be advertised on the network), support for both gif and jpeg banners, and more.

However, it can't be overlooked that there are a couple of drawbacks to the Traffic^X service. For one thing, their graphics load slowly, at least they appear to from where I live. That is one of the reasons I always place their banners at the bottom of my pages, as that way they have finished loading by the time my visitors scroll to the bottom of the page.

Another drawback (or benefit, depending on how you look at it) is the fact that webmasters who have banners with high click through rates will be "punished" for it. The banners on their own sites will receive a generally less click through rate, and so their banner gets clicked a lot less then it otherwise would.

So Traffic^X is better for sites that don't get quite so desirable a click through rate on their banners. Or is it? Maybe instead of designing a banner that is "click friendly", you could take this opportunity to develop one that is tells a little bit more about your site, so that only those that are genuinely interested in your subject will come to your site.

Traffic^X also sells extra click throughs for $.20 a click, which is slightly on the high side, but not so high I would say it is over priced. You would just be able to find the same sort of thing cheaper elsewhere.

All in all I highly recommend this exchange. It implements many innovative new features, and has shown itself to be an excellent performer.

Visit Traffic^X to sign up, or to receive more information!

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