Free banner exchange

any cons?

[hasbeen]

We're looking at offering a free banner exchange program to our cusotmers. It would be a 1:2 exchange (for every 2 impressions you get 1 impression in network). Now, what are the chances that this type of system would actually hurt a site rather than help it? Would SE's see this as spam?

As an aside, this is not an in-house project. We'd be partnering with a different company and they would provide the banner serving and coding.

[itrainu]

Banners are not considered an effective form of advertising these days so it would be wrong to delude the customers into thinking that they are paying to get more qualified traffic...

My 2 cents ;-)

itrainu

[Travoli]

I don't believe that banner tracking links are penalized by SE's. Anyone else heard contrary?

Affiliate links might be a different story, but banner tracking programs, I have not heard about penalties on.

[hasbeen]

Please let me reiterate that there's no payment at all. This is a free service. My other concern is the quality of banners and selection of banners displayed. I've read through some posts here about bCentral not being terribly discrete with Adult content banners displaying "out of network" (not that we're looking at bCentral as a partner, mind you). I suppose you take your chances with this type of thing.