In preparation for the holidays, I've been looking for ways to drive traffic to two new landing pages on Shopobot -- namely our iPod and Canon price guides. I ran across RealTrafficSource.com randomly and I noticed they have dirt cheap rates for driving traffic to your site, so I thought I'd investigate more.
First thing I noticed was the offering sounded a bit shady. Usually if you're buying traffic for a quarter of a cent per click (their cheapest package is 1,000 visitors for $2.50) to $0.0001 per click (their most expensive package) you're going to get a lot of junk traffic. I was wondering what their source of traffic is -- but their website doesn't give much information:
Our traffic comes from our own large network of specialized websites and from expired domains, each with its own narrow market, we have come across during our long experience in the online marketing industry. Because we've been in the business so long, we know where to find the hard-to-get traffic.
Our own network of websites receives thousands of visitors every day. We collect this traffic and, using a special algorithm, deliver it to our customer's website.
Well, fair enough! I thought I'd give it a try -- because if worse comes to worse I'm only out $30.
After a day or so I started seeing hits. One thing I've noticed is that 2/3rds of the hits are coming from Russia, Ukraine, and Romania. Hmmm, odd. Here's what I saw in Google Analytics:

Since you can only really use Shopobot if you live in North America, this isn't exactly what I'd like to see.
On another website I manage an individual user tried using RealTrafficSource.com and didn't find much success. In fact, 100% of visitors left the site immediately upon viewing the page. Check it out in Google Analytics again:

100%? Ouch.
After this has run for a while I'll check my log files to see if I can find out more about these mysterious Russian visitors and what they've done on my website. However, the bottom line for now is that this seems like a bad deal for any websites that require American or English Speaking visitors.
I'll update this post with any findings.