A Busy Time for Paid to Read Programs

I've not posted for a while quite deliberately. There has been so much going on that I was hoping for the dust to settle a little. For those of you who don't follow these things there has been real controversy over the Adbux program. A number of people have been questioning the program over whether it was a Ponzi scheme and questioning the involvement of Chad French of Netbux infamy.

Adbux sent out the following e-mail:

In yesterday's newsletter we tried to shed some light on our 3 month long anonymity by explaining how we've founded our parent company - which is a company that will wean its way out of the gimpy "get-paid-to" corner of the Internet and establish a real industry called "incentive based marketing" that will attract main stream advertisers as well as small time website owners to a great way to advertise and market their website/product/service. Our plan was to unveil our parent company name, the owners, the location, contact information, etc. However - there are people out there who envy such an opportunity; people who would love to manage such an innovative and ingenious idea; people who have worked hard their entire entrepreneurial Internet lives to invent such a program that they are willing to go into absolute ludicrousness by creating lies and manipulating the truth. This is why we need to divulge all information now.

My name is Tyler Gibson. I've lead most admin functions on the website as well as fully controlled the forum through our moderators. There is Jayden Williams on e-mail support. There is Aston Miller who also runs administrative functions. Our parent company is Incentrum, LLC. The owners of Incentrum are Chad French and Dustin Cucciarre. The office address is at 665 East Main Street Lake Butler, Florida 32054 USA. The contact number is not yet established but it will be made public within the next couple of weeks. It will not be a number used for AdBux support - but a number for general contact inquiries and the main contact number for our local services that we will provide. Our servers are located in California and our host is Aplus.Net. You will be able to contact the owners (Chad & Dustin) via e-mail at an e-mail address sometime in the near future. Your contact with them should not be support related, but again - for general inquiry.

In case you are not aware of what the entire stink is about - websites like http://adbuxtruth.blogspot.com and http://adbuxscam.com try to coax the reader into believing that AdBux (and now Incentrum) are out to scam people and steal all their money and run off with it. This is not true. What are their lies founded on? It's simple. In April of 2005 (coincidentally the same month that AdBux launched in 2007) Chad French created a program called Netbux that paid users pennies and then later on paid users shares (of advertisement revenue) to surf the web using Google (at first) and then later on added other popular search engines. The whole idea was to capitalize on each search by displaying the search results in a frame and using the top ¼ of the screen to display ads. At first, Netbux did really well and according to records, Netbux came close to being in the top 1,000 most popular websites on the Internet. Then, it all went down. Google threatened Chad with lawsuits if he didn't remove Google as the search provider and major security vulnerabilities throughout the website exploited by hackers caused major account issues which turned into PayPal disputes, which then finally caused PayPal to freeze the Netbux account with a little over $22,000 that belonged to the members. The payment processor was quickly changed to StormPay and then StormPay froze the Netbux account because of people complaining about their money being unpaid from their PayPal accounts! Actually, StormPay stole all of the money. It wasn't frozen. It was stolen.

90 days after Netbux went down... PayPal unfroze half of the $22,000 ($11,000) and released it back to the rightful owners. Then, after 180 days, PayPal released the rest (at least that's what they say). Chad French never received any money despite the lies that the above websites represent. Those who paid money through StormPay never received their money because StormPay stole it.

2 years later after much gained thought, capital and experience through other online marketing ventures, Chad French came back with AdBux to try again with a fail proof business plan. On April 10th AdBux opened and has been doing great ever since. I (Tyler) came on board early in the game and then Jayden was hired for e-mail support and then Chad partnered with a long time business acquaintance - Dustin Cucciarre.

AdBux from a business point of view is totally genius (look at all the programs that have popped up all over the Internet that are JUST like AdBux). Advertisers come in and pay us $0.03 per click and we then turn around and pay the members $0.03 per click. None of the advertising revenue goes to AdBux or Incentrum. Everyone has a referrer and everyone has the option of upgrading - so therefore we pay out 100%. If a user isn't upgraded or has yet to be referred (through our referral purchase program) then we simply sit on those extra advertising revenues as a cushion to help sponsor our own ads.

The sponsorship of our own ads works incredibly easy. On average, AdBux earns between $50,000 to $70,000 a month just from referral purchases, upgrades and other types of advertising throughout the site (the top ad banner, extra ad revenue from advertisers). We spend around 75% (give or take... it changes every week) on sponsoring and buying our own ads. Therefore, we've created a loop of income for both the company and for the users. AdBux is NOT a ponzi scheme as the above sites mentioned before like to address. A ponzi scheme involves giving high returns through investing and new investors must continue to be recruited in order to pay off earlier investors. Ponzi schemes always fail when it cannot find any more recruits to continue the payouts to the earlier investors.

We hope to eventually dwindle and cease our own sponsorship of ads and let the advertisers control it all. This is what the new ad system promises that will launch on Monday the 16th. We will continue to buy and sponsor our own ads but will ultimately close the sponsorship unless it's needed (if advertisers are slow). Currently, without the new ad system up and not including our own sponsored ads, we are receiving a whopping 840 advertisers per month! Not bad for only 3 months old!

I, along with Chad and Dustin, hope that this letter clears up any doubt in the stability and future of AdBux and its parent - Incentrum. There are lots of plans in store for Incentrum as far as incentive based marketing goes and we would like to take all the loyal members with us. Nobody has uncovered some "secret conspiracy" or high profile criminal business activity. In fact, we in the office thought it was funny at first to read some of the ridiculous postings and websites that have popped up in our offense but now the rumors have seriously gotten out of control to a point to where it's no longer funny.

For any person, any website or any forum who tries to convince you that AdBux is a scam, please stick this letter in their face. We need to try to put a stop to the absurdity so we can move on with the future of AdBux.

Thanks,
Tyler

I struggled for some time to get my head round all the arguments and [I should note hear that at one part of my life I taught Mathematical Modelling] I modelled and remodelled using all the information I could get and was on the verge of posting here that I was getting out of the program - that is until I had my "eureka moment". Let's consider for one moment that I am involved in Affiliate Marketing and I want to get lots and lots of cheap advertising. Creating Adbux as a vehicle for this would be sheer bloody genius! Pay people to read your ads but once software, hosting and some small admin costs are covered the cost to you of potentially building a massive affiliate downline are really quite small. If you are on the pull for affiliates how do you do it? Advertise! In this case they have built a platform around their own advertising needs and are rolling it out to others. How are the critics costing this? I suspect not at all.

When I put into my models the potential of relatively small numbers of affiliates into the downlines of the owners it all made sense. That is not to say I don't have issues with Adbux because I do. I don't like the relatively high minimum payout level of $10 - I take the view that a truly ethical site owner should start paying at $1 - see Make Free Money Online [more on this site in a moment] - and frankly I'm not seeing many ads and I suspect the site is so US based that not many others are who are non US based are seeing many [today I only saw one ad!].

So whilst I think caution should be exercised we should be sticking with Adbux - but please keep in mind it could be a risk.

Going back to Make Free Money Online there have been a few changes here and generally for the better. Paid to Review has been dropped but replaced by a Paid to Search option. For users the best change is that you get more (double) ads for your dollar if you upgrade making them really good value. This definitely my favourite site at the moment. They are honest about upgrades - you do it to access cheap advertising; they are reacting to changes in the market and there is a realistic low payout threshold which can help draw people new into the Paid to Read game (yes I chose the word carefully).

Over the next few days I am going to try and summarise the changes in Paid to Read programs; look at methods to develop a downline [this is where the money is] and how you can drive traffic to your site(s).

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