As a HitLeap user, you can submit a URL into their network. Then nothing happens, because you don’t have any accrued minutes. In order to earn hits to your website, you need to acquire minutes. In order to acquire minutes, you need to browse through the HitLeap network and click on existing links to other sites. You have to do this through their browser, in order for the clicks to count.
Once you have earned minutes, you can spend them to put your link into the public awareness for a certain number of hits. Once you’ve gained that traffic, you’ve spent your minutes, and you must accrue more in order to earn more traffic.
At the outset, this sounds like a viable means of generating traffic. Indeed, a traffic exchange is a real and useful service, as long as it’s moderated and regulated properly. When it’s not, well, you end up with something like HitLeap.
The Problems with HitLeap
HitLeap has a few problems, and that’s the core of this review. There are problems on both sides of the service.
On the side of earning minutes, you have automated tools designed specifically to work with HitLeap’s browser, such as HitLeap Viewer. This automated tool runs on an idle computer and browses through links in the background, earning you minutes. As a client, this means you’re able to freely rack up minutes you can spend for traffic. A pretty good deal, right?
When you’re browsing, you’re going to find that a lot of the links you see are affiliate links, often run through a money-earning service like AdFly. This means the person posting the link earns when you click it, and earns again when the site loads through AdFly. You’re giving money to the people posting their links. Chances are good that the sites in question are going to be selling products or displaying ads you don’t care about, which is why you turn to the automatic viewer. It’s faster and you don’t have to waste your own time with it.
Making Money with HitLeap
The lofty ideals of a traffic exchange are corrupted through HitLeap. They proudly display how 90+ billion links have been exchanged through their service, but they say nothing about the quality of their traffic. That’s because most everyone on the site is using this routine to make money.
- First they set up an account with a referral payment service, which earns them money when a user clicks to their page. Payment for display ads is the typical source of income here.
- Second, they run the link through AdFly to shorten it and earn them extra money whenever a user comes through.
- Third, they submit their affiliate AdFly link to HitLeap. Once the system approves it, their link is in the system.
- Fourth, they run HitLeap Viewer to automatically rack up minutes, typically overnight while their computers are otherwise idle. Some people will even run the viewer on a dedicated machine or in the background 24/7.
- Fifth, they spend their minutes on HitLeap, knowing full well the traffic coming in is from bots. They don’t care, because bot traffic hitting their AdFly link is making them money, and bots clicking through to their main display site is earning them money. Even if no one ever buys their affiliate products, they still earn cash, a penny at a time.
- Sixth, they start it all over again when HitLeap removes their link, AdFly blocks their account or their affiliate drops them for using bot traffic.
HitLeap claims to be AdSense safe, meaning you could potentially plug in your legitimate Google links into the system. They are able to cloak their traffic to appear as though it’s coming from legitimate sites. Is it actually, or is it cloaked? That’s a question only the insiders could answer.
Does it Work? Is it Valuable?
Well, HitLeap does work. You can certainly earn money, and traffic, through the site. Once again, however, it all comes down to traffic quality. By itself, the traffic you’re getting from HitLeap is largely in the form of bots. Therefore, you’re only earning what your affiliates pay per view, which is typically pennies per thousand views.
If you have a bank of computers set up running this system full time, you could make a reasonable amount of money, but chances are you’re not going to be pulling in real commissions or real sales from HitLeap traffic.
In general, you’re much better off buying traffic from a more reputable source, one that isn’t riddled with bots with no actual human interaction
HitLeap - Free Website Traffic
