Mail exchange
An email exchange is a special form of advertising on the Internet.
How a mail exchange works
By registering with a mail exchange service, you agree to regularly receive promotional mails from the provider of this service. You can limit the number of emails sent daily by this provider. In addition to the actual advertising, each of these advertising emails contains an individual confirmation link. If you open an email and click on the link it contains, a website is opened. The service provider can register this call and credit the user with a certain amount of points. Depending on the provider, the requested page must remain open in the browser window for a certain period of time before a credit is issued.
These points can then be used to either advertise this service yourself, or to have them paid out in the form of money or e-currency . In addition to the possibility of sending advertising emails, various other forms of advertising such as banners , text links or pop-ups are often offered. Such advertising is worthwhile for everyone who lacks a large advertising budget or who would like to use additional advertising opportunities on the Internet.
The development until today
The first scripts were programmed by "Alpha-Scripts" in PHP and MySQL . Originally, these scripts were very expensive, so there were only a few providers. In 2000 there were 3 large script forges that sold their mail exchange scripts. Accordingly, they dominated the market. Since 2003 the scripts u. a. on Ebay a real price drop, so that it is possible for anyone to purchase a script and start a mail exchange. Several mail exchange providers sprang up every month. The market became saturated within a few years. Most providers have either discontinued the service or run it with 10–20 active users.
In the years 2002–2003 the first free mail exchange scripts came onto the market. So everyone could start their own service easily and free of charge. This also damaged the form of advertising and caused the prices for the scripts to drop. The scripts offered were full of errors and ran very badly - the budding webmasters could hardly see the qualitative difference and started the service with an inferior product. However, this quickly put off users.
The user numbers of the mail exchange providers are constantly falling. The market leaders in Germany have around 5000 users, of which 10–20% are active. According to the insiders, the "mail exchange" advertising form is dead.