site that pays for 404 error traffic

[jer]

Does anyone know of a site that would pay me for directing my 404 error traffic to them? One of my very old sites is generating a lot of this kind of traffic, and I'd very much like to make some money off of it

thanks,

[Czar]

If you can customize your 404 pages, a blind link company will let you place an "Enter" button on your 404s, to encourage your misguided viewers to click-thru, but they will not allow you to automatically redirect users through their systems. SearchReferral may also allow you to establish a full-page directory on the custom 404, but you'll need to email them for confirmation before taking it live.

[Son Nguyen]

exitfuel.com
404found.com

However, I don't like any site does that to me

[jer]

what, redirect 404 traffic to your site which ends up sucking your bandwidth? :P
The amount of 404 traffic we were getting was making our bandwidth charges skyrocket, thats why we need a good place to redirect. I'll check those sites.. thanks

[Czar]

To establish a fake enter button like the one I mentioned above, you will need an HTML document that is about 0.5k in size, along with either a graphical or text-based "Enter" button that could vary from 0-5k.

Let's say, as a worse-case-scenario, that your custom 404 page takes up 6k. In that case, you would be able to serve approximately 166000 pageviews/gig. Now, at current market rates, 1GB of traffic costs about $5.

In order to cover your costs, then, only 1 person in 1000 would need to click on the Enter button in order for you to make $5. My experience (you can see an example of my fake entrance page here), reveals that approx 30-50% of visitors click on the link.

Forget about your bandwidth concern. I have no idea how you managed to generate so much 404 traffic, but if these misdirected hits are being made by real people, you have the opportunity to make a great deal of money through AllClicks.

[jer]

The 404 traffic is generated by an old free host I used to be involved with. When a site is deleted for abuse, there are usually still other links to it throughout the net - take several thousand sites being deleted and you get a TON of 404 traffic.

[Czar]

Gotcha. Well that's great. At least that ensures that it's all human traffic. Plus, if they're searching for content that breaches the free host's terms, they're probably not the kinds of visitors who would become irritated by having a blind link or search engine greet them in place of an otherwise broken link.

If you do choose to experiment with one of these methods, I'd be very grateful if you could report your results here. I had considered starting a free host, but put off the launch date due to low ad rates and the feeling that abuse monitoring would take over my life. If it's possible to generate money from the 'work' of these abusers, then the gamble may be more worthwhile.

[Czar]

I just got wind of another program that claims to pay for 404 traffic:
http://www.anywebtraffic.com/buy.htm

Before signing on, check out some comments made about the company at Geek/Talk:
http://geekvillage.com/ubb/Forum4/HTML/004769.html

They do look promising...but looks can be deceiving.

[Son Nguyen]

Originally posted by Son Nguyen
exitfuel.com
404found.com

However, I don't like any site does that to me

What I meant there is that I, as a surfer don't like exit popup (not a webmaster)
However, now I see that these are just wasted traffic anyway.

[jer]

Well, the exit-popups are something I'm planning on including in a project I've just started working on. As a surfer and webmaster, which would you prefer: pop-up on entry, or on exit?

As a webmaster I'd prefer on exit. As a visitor - well, I'm not sure but usually on exit is better because on entry that means it will keep popping up whenever I click to go back to the homepage or whatever.. on exit just means I see it once and close it and it's done with.

[Czar]

As both a webmaster and surfer, I prefer popbehinds on entry, such as those offered by PopupTraffic ($2CPM), GoClick ($2.5CPM) and AdScholar ($4CPM).