jayeff

Whether we are talking about copycat pay sites or copycat traffic engines, experienced webmasters are the ones most likely to cause more than a blip on the radar. Sure, give it a while and any bandwagon will get loaded down with new webmasters too, but they are rarely the ones who have a lot of impact.

Which points to the flaw in most of what you have written in this thread. Traffic generating business models are not of themselves intrinsically good or bad, guaranteed to produce high conversions, low conversions, good retention or poor retention. There likely is some difference between a site trumpeting the word "free" and another which requires surfers to read text, but when the first handful of sites of a certain type appear, their traffic is relatively fresh. The biggest impact on traffic quality is once hundreds/thousands of sites are all pushing for visibility and most will inevitably be forced to circulate washed out traffic.