Autosurfing sites are sites that will simulate traffic on your site, usually through an exchange: something like “for every 30 seconds you view one of the sites our members have submitted, another one of our members will view your site”.

The end result that autosurfs advertise is that your site gets Real Traffic Fast^TM, while the end result in reality is that your site gets a bunch of low-quality traffic from disinterested readers who are just running out the clock so that someone else will do them the same favour. They don’t work, but have an appeal to someone who wants to see their hits go up, no matter how it happens.

Wikipedia has a great article about them, with a few main takeaways:

• they don’t work
• they are often structured as pyramid schemes
• those that aren’t structured as pyramid schemes are often structured as Pozni schemes, and if money is involved, can actually be illegal
• the larger autosurfs, like 12DailyPro, collapsed under SEC investigation and legal troubles in 2006, but many are still around

So generally, they’re something you want to avoid. If you’re a Project Wonderful publisher they’re definitely something you want to avoid, as using autosurfs to inflate the page views of your site goes against our Terms Of Service, and will result in your ad boxes being deleted and your account being shut down. So just in case you’re tempted by the promise of “REAL TRAFFIC NOW” — we’d advise you to look twice, and do the research.

One of the most common questions we get at our customer service address goes something like this:

“Hi! I like your service, but I’ve noticed that many bidders cancel bids before they expire. Does that mean they’re ripping me off, because they don’t have to pay when they cancel a bid?”

The short answer is “No, as a publisher you earn money every second a bid is displayed on your site“. And as an advertiser, you’re charged every second your bid is the high bidder. These charges happen every few seconds and are credited (or charged) to your account automatically.

The longer answer is that, although we discuss advertising in terms of cost per day (ie: how much it costs to have your ad on a site for an entire day), bids don’t have to last a full day. We actually charge bidders every few seconds to the nearest 1/100th of a second, so there’s no way anyone can gain anything by cancelling a bid: it just prevents future charges.

For example, if someone bids your ad box up to $24 a day and sits there for an hour before cancelling, then we will charge them $1.00. On our site, the values we show are rounded to the nearest cent, but if you hold your mouse over the “current profits” number (if you’re a publisher) or the “current expense” number (if you’re an advertiser), you’ll see the a less-rounded version.

As most of you know, we do allow bidders (and publishers) to cancel any bid at any time. Often bidders will try out a site for a bit to see the performance. When a bid is cancelled, there’s no way anyone is gaming the system or not paying anything - they still have to pay for the time they were up. In addition, our campaign system will sometimes cancel bids as it manages the campaign: that’s probably where most of these cancelled bids are coming from!

But I’m not just posting this to clear this issue up. Over the past few weeks, we’ve made changes to the site to try to make this more clear to our members, but nevertheless, this question still arrives in our in box once in a while. Much less frequently, granted, but still enough for it to be noticable! I think it’s time to admit that maybe the word “cancelled” wasn’t the right choice: it has connotations of “undo” to it, a sense of “oh, wait, wait, I take this back”.

We’re considering renaming the “cancelled” status to something a bit more clear: “Expired early” is our current favourite, but we’re open to alternatives! If you have any suggestions, feel free to post them in the comments, with our thanks. And you can expect to see the current naming of the “cancelled” status to be “expired early” in the near future.