Yes to improve alexa rank and to get some cheap clicks on the ads and also to get to trick the stats If you are on a free hosting.
Some people want to improve their Rank to be accepted into specific affiliate program. Other are falsley led into beliveing that it actually means something.
"Auto-surfing†is a form of online advertising that purportedly generates advertising revenue for companies that want to increase traffic to their websites. The premise behind auto-surfing is that companies that advertise on the Internet are willing to pay to increase traffic to their web sites. These companies hire an auto-surf firm or “host,†which in turn pays individual web surfers to view certain websites on an automatically rotating basis. The more sites the individual visits, the more money he or she stands to earn."
People can also do it to try and get advertisers on board. Definitely not a good way of getting traffic, and in my opinion is a massive waste of time.
I've long hated autosurfs and manual surfs. Recently I found out how to use this CRAP TRAFFIC and turn it into money. Oh, also I hacked up a nice little script that clicks the next button for you on a very popular manual surf site. PM me for details. Juicy details like this are a staple for subscribers of my Blackhat Secrets list.
This was profitable a few years back when using ptp, untill all the tweaks came along with browsers like FF for instant, you could easilly set it to automatic pilot. This with a downline could easily make a few dollars ,even without it,it was still $5 a day. For "games" like hyips it could be generated for fals impressions of users to invest. Nowadays can't see how this is utilized in any way,except "the dark side", like previous poster mentioned.
You could possibly fool adsense for a few thousand impressions...until they catch you but be forewarned that they will ban your account for it.
Why would they want to trick their stats if they are on a free host. Getting useless traffic would just look as if your site is getting more traffic and the more traffic you get the higher chance the free hosting provider will probably want you removed for using so much bandwidth if you grow to big with useless traffic.
I would autosurf to pull in some quick cash... however, i think it's a risky investment. I remember back before the 12DailyPro scandal, it was very popular. But after something like 50 million bucks was lost, I think it died down quite rapidly. I don't think I would take the risk.