The Market for Traffic Exchanges

To reach your customers... understand what they need

General Info

Let's start with some basic information, which shows a little about the opportunity, and the customer's problem:

• The internet currently has almost 600,000,000 domains (source: Internet Systems Consortium), and it has doubled in less than four years
• There were over 1.4 Billion users online in 2008 (source: Internet World Stats).
• A conservative estimate is that 1 in 4 websites are trying to sell something

The internet is a huge organization of people and businesses that are trying to find each other.  If you're a non-business person, you either go to a search engine, or to a friend, and find out what you need online.  However, if you are a business....

That's the real objective behind a traffic exchange: Showing your business / product / service to as many people as possible, and spending as little per 'view' as possible.  Traffic exchanges are self-contained advertising businesses, that are best used as an 'adjunct' to another business.

Fact #1: Very few people will earn a full-time income from running a traffic exchange as an end in itself.

People get excited about 'having an online business'.  A traffic exchange is a low-income endeavor: The primary value is to develop a traffic stream and an advertising network to promote other business ventures.  Used correctly, a Traffic Exchange is a powerful tool for an online business.

Fact #2: Many online businesses derive 30% or more of their other business income as a direct result of owning a traffic exchange.

So, for those who have something to promote: A product, a service, even a few programs they affiliate with, owning a traffic exchange is a great way to increase customer visibility, and increase sales.

Your customer (who would buy a traffic exchange)

Your typical customer will have many or all of the following qualities:

• (93%) will already have an online business they are trying to promote.
• (80%) will be an affiliate of three or more product sites.
• (75%) will already have used 3-5 means of advertising, like banner and text-ad systems, or buying ad space on other domains.
• (25%) will consider themselves "knowledgeable about html".
• (12%) will consider themselves "knowledgeable about web programming".
• (20%) have ever heard of a traffic exchange. Yes, you read correctly: 4/5 of our prospects never heard of a traffic exchange!

This information (except the last item) is from a brief survey of over 215 traffic exchange owners.  There are currently over 22,000 traffic exchanges out there (source:  Google search results, after removing duplicate results), and there is a high turnover in the industry, primarily because people don't understand why they should run a traffic exchange in the first place.

Why are we so excited?

Keep in mind that this is a conservative estimate:  If there are 22,000+ traffic exchanges out there, and this represents purchases when less than 20% of the people who could benefit know the product exists, that means that there are at least 88,000 small online businesses out there, waiting to learn about traffic exchanges, so they can buy one.

This is a huge opportunity for us as a software provider, and we need sales & marketing help, which is where you come in.