POAD Team is a traffic exchange that forces visitors to read your page, rather than just surf it.
On the face of it, this sounds like a great idea. Visitors read your page to find the answer to a question you specify, so they’re actually paying at least some attention to what’s on the page. Some of them might be interested in what you have to offer. And the idea is a great one.
POAD Team, however, has some aspects that I think will eventually kill the exchange.
Automatically deleting accounts for inactivity
Their rationale for automatically deleting inactive accounts sounds reasonable…they want active members. But this ignores the fact that many people are active at traffic exchanges only infrequently. They’ll surf it for a while, then let it sit for a month or two before coming back to surf it some more.
Deleting those accounts arbitrarily nearly ensures they won’t be back. The referrers of those people lose a referral who might have come back and been active later.
Deleting accounts is almost always a very bad idea, especially in a traffic exchange where the main benefit is getting your site viewed by as many different people as possible.
Must surf to gain from referral surfing
Many exchanges enforce some sort of activity requirement. The most typical I’ve seen is that your web site doesn’t show on the exchange unless you’ve surfed some minimum number of sites within a given time period.
At the POAD Team exchange, you only gain credits from your referrals’ surfing if you have surfed 3 sites on the same day that they surf. This seems unnecessarily restrictive to me. You’ve gone to the work to get those referrals into the exchange, you should earn from their surfing regardless of your own activity level.
Automatically sending emails that look like they’re from your sponsor
One of my referrals received an email that looked like it was from me, complaining about them not surfing lately. Now, if the exchange wants to send out reminders to surf, that’s fine. But they shouldn’t forge an email and make it seem as if I was the one who sent it.
All told, the rules at the POAD Team exchange seem fairly arbitrary, and not very well thought out. The goal of having an active team surfing the exchange is a good one, but you can’t expect 100% activity in any group of people.
I’d give the POAD Team exchange another year before they’ve eliminated most of the accounts, and what’s left is a few dozen people viewing each others’ sites.