Well, basically im asking out of curiosity, but maybe someone would find it useful

anyways i just want to know, what is the most important factors for choosing manuel surf?
ie. is targeting a major issue for you?
high surfing ratios?
good referral plan?
upgrade possibilities?

please name the 3 most important factors for you in a ordered list, and you are welcome to use some i did not mention or add a side note of stuff you would like to see

thank you in advance

1- Targeting. You can have a million advertising credits but if you can't target you are very likely to wind up with a million hits from China and then its bye-bye credits.

2- How long is the timer? I love SAS's 10-second timer. I can surf twice as many sites there than I can at EM with a 20-second timer.

3-Whta kind of extras does the site offer? Is there a lot of bonus cash and credits? Are there fun games to play? Is there a PTC section as well? An "affiliate exchange" such as at EM where members can offer credits to other members for joining in their downlines at other programs?

Honorable mention- Are the upgrade fees and benefits worth the price charged? Sorry Hogs Hollow, but $7.99 (or is it $7.50?) per week is a little too much for what you get. SAS's $2.00 for a platinum is a great value and their $0.40 I think it is for a silver upgrade is an excellent deal as well.

10 seconds might be great when you are surfing, but I wonder how many valid hits lots of pages get on ten seconds? I agree that 20 seconds is perhaps a bit long.

With high speed internet now being the norm (not the exception) most pages load within that time. If they don't, the server is either overloaded or an affiliate banner/popup has "froze" and I doubt 20 seconds is going to do the trick either. In fact, I have purposely waited over 1 minute for it to "unfreeze" and finish loading.

I guess if you're not using high speed internet then it would be a problem. 99.99% of the pages I see load in 10 seconds or less (not counting donkey when its SQL server acts up) But then again, anyone who tries viewing PTP pages over dial up is crazy.

Heck thought I was crazy but no dont use dial up. I dont surf much these days so perhaps I shouldnt have commented. Maybe I should go surf a bit and see what happens.

Case in point is the ad results discussion here in this forum with SAS and <a few sites>

The latest results have been fairly accurate with only a few credits "lost in cyberspace". That would lead me to believe that 10 seconds is enough time for 99% of the pages to load.

Of course, 12 to 15 seconds would be fair as well.

Under 10 would be pushing our luck with so many sites have a ton of graphics/banners on them.

I have never upgraded at Hogshollow, but their homepage says that the upgrade is valid for 30 days. Are you sure it's a week? I was planning to upgrade for 30 days when I have a bit more time in January.

As for my list, there are 5 factors that are important to me, couldn't really limit it to 3:

1. Targeting - for reasons Chris mentioned.

2. Number of sites I can promote. I wish Hogshollow was not limited to 5 sites for a non-upgraded member. I love the no-limit at SAS.

3. How many of the ptp sites I'm in are allowed. Ideally, I'd love a surf where all my ptp's would be allowed (with the exception of Aquamails, sice the site itself doesn't allow promotion in any manual surfs).

4. Possibility to transfer unused credits assigned to a site back to my account. Maybe I don't see some obvious function, but I don't know how to do that at Hogshollow. When a month or two ago Ivymails was down for a couple of days, my only option (if I wanted to have 5 sites running, not 4) was to delete Ivy from my list. The unused credits don't come back to your account in such case, they just vanish into the thin air.

5. Last but definitely not least: the size, contrast and readability of turing numbers/symbols. Anyone with poor eyesight will know what I'm talking about. This is the one feature where Hogshollow beats the other 2 surfs I'm in - their large symbols are just perfect. After 2 hours of surfing Hogshollow, I'm OK. After two hours of surfing SAS, my eyes are mildly irritated. After 2 hours of surfing Easyhits4u, my eyes want to jump out of my head.

Of course, there are other features, such as the number of daily hits, the length of timer, the extras, but the above 5 are the most important ones for me.

On your browser...
Go to "View" >Text Size> Increase.... Should help a wee bit on those itty bitty tiny numbers

Braves, thank you so much. Just tried it and it does help a bit

24 hour and tier targetting

lots of members so hits go fast and u don't run out of pages to view

and a fun game or way to earn extra credits to keep me addicted and surfing all day!

You are correct...my bad. It is for 30 days. I just pulled one of my emails from them where I hit them with a bunch of questions after I joined. Finishing the last....few....drops....of....eggnog......



To do this, email HH admin and Paul will manually remove the credits for you and add them back to you account. I had to do this for the Edayz unapproval garbage as I still had credits asigned to my Edayz links.



Ironically, Hogs Hollow is the worst for this for me! My eyesight isn't as good as it was not so long ago so I usually have my text size set to largest. Well, when I first started surfing The Hollow I din't know that having the text so large made it impossible to see the bonus cash and credits becasue it was squeezed out of the frame so my acount soon got flagged as a cheater because I never collected what I couldn't see. Paul advised me to change my text down to medium or smaller which corrected the problem. HH is now the hardest one for me to read the symbols (in Firefox that is, when I use IE it is a little better than SAS and EM)

edited

1. lots of daily hits
2. alot of tier1/2 hits(not necessarily tier targetting but not too much tier 3/4 hits)
3. bonuses if its .5:1 ratio, plus other fun stuff if possible

hmm, nice replies so far

what would you guys think of a surf with no upgrade option then?

no upgrade option..... not really that big a deal, but it prolly lessens the profitability of the surf for the PO, which might not be good for the members also

There are quite a few varying reasons that members join a site and upgrade, some sign up, upgrade their account for the monthly added bonus hits, text impressions and banner impressions. They add their advertising campaigns and may not surf or surf very rarely. The upgrade option gives them more choice than purely buying the website hits, banner impressions or text impressions.
There are others that like the benefits of the upgrade option of the monthly bonus hits, the higher surf ratio, longer personal page display time and in some traffic exchanges the single surfbar rather than the multiple surfbar.

well it's hard to name three most importand ones

1. Lost of sites to surf - i hate the site where i surf all avaible pages or when i surf the same page all the time
2. Safe sites - no virus, malware, autosurfs etc. At this term it comes handy to have a good report feature (current and previous site as some sites crash the browsing window)
3. Bonuses - cash or credits awarded thanks to random function or thanks to game like Pick Right Door or something
4. Small and nicely done timer window
5. Possibility to sell credits at decent rate
6. PP and EG options (2 most popular ones)
7. Fast and reliable feedback


No upgrade option sounds fine to me - i never really bought and upgrade on Manual Surfs. And as someone earlier mentioned - with no upgrade You will earn less


~filix