Progress at last

Well I've not actually withdrawn anything yet but here is my latest account info:

$26 ready to withdraw.

My earnings rate has stayed fairly flat at just above o.6 per rented referral per day and I'm down to 1111 rented referrals from 1235.

Here's the graphic:

I have a little dilemma now, should I renew all referrals that I choose to do for 90 days to get maximum discount or follow my current policy? I need to really think this through given that I really want to get cash out. Which is my priority? Possible future profits or cash now?

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Neobux progress report

Rented referrals down to 1146 today's clicks very disappointing. Just two days to go until I should be able to build a pot to cashout.

Did a bit if maths and found that if I retained just my top sixteen clicking referrals I would, with my own clicks, draw out more than I did per year than I did with 1235 rented referrals. I'm not really sure Neobux is a scam but...

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Neobux Income Begins to Collapse

Let me first say that I'm not at all surprised by it but the collapse in my referral has begun in earnest.

Have a look at this:

Given that the referrals I am not renewing are ones that have clicked at a very low rate you would think that the click rate of the remainder would increase, wouldn't you? In fact the opposite is happening. I'm really wishing I had taken screenshots in July just after I had renewed my Gold membership when the click rate jumped up and with 1235 referrals I was getting around 1600 referral clicks a day. After a week or two it returned to the 840 a day average I was used to.

All very dodgy and I think I can be sure the whole program is massaged. Very disappointing - and I fell for it!

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Update on Neobux Scam

My withdrawal strategy is as simple as can be. Do not renew if average clicks is less than 0.8 and when required renew those with an average greater than 1.0 for 90 days the rest being renewed for 30 or 60 days depending on cash available.

Progress? Not much yet. My rented renewals have reduced from 1235 to 1201 but the clicks I am receiving has remained much the same!

From the 28th of August I have a number of days with few renewals due and whereas in the past I would have reinvested this money I shall this time aim to withdraw.

I am due payouts at Donkeymails and No-minimum however due to the reduction in PTP rate at Donkeymails I will be using EQOO2 as the focus of my cashouts now.

Over the next week or two I will write honestly about where I have been earning money lately and I shall write a long article on PTP.

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Neobux Scam?

I have here to be open and admit to my utter stupidity - I rather let things go with Neobux and took my eye off the ball. All of a sudden I realise how much I have invested and with little prospect of getting it back.

How did it happen? Well here is my tale of woe...

Look at the numbers:

Invested so far = $720.00

Amount received = $225.08 (re-invested of course)

The banners show this:

Of the amount earned it has all been reinvested of course so the reality is that I have lost $720 so far although I am a Gold (Sapphire) member with 1235 referrals. My major concern at the moment is how to get out whilst minimising losses.

All my referrals are now rented as my direct referrals have become inactive; even the Gold ones. I can't believe I never spotted that. Never mind I was probably too caught up promoting GDI!

I will update here on my exit strategy.

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ClickBux finally bites the dust?

I've written a few times in the past about ClickBux and what I thought would be the eventual demise. Well it finally seems to have happened. I've logged on and clicked for ages - never in expectation of payment - and today when I tried to acess the site I got a short glimpse of a site suspended message before it jumped to an ad.

Now this has happened at least once before so it may not be the real end yet but I would have thought so. ClickBux was notable for carrying all the ads a self-respecting site admin would have refused [and I suspect many of them were self-sourced] so it is no great loss!

RIP ClickBux?

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Bux.to Bux Scam?

From uronlinebiz.com 13 May 2008

Recently the word scam seems to have become a common word on most PTC related communities. This isn’t a good thing as for a long while the PTC industry has been drying up on new advertisers. Many of the outside advertises are still sceptical of the PTC advertising method so they look to forums and blogs to find out more which is where they are put off by the scam spam.

According to the dictionary the word scam means “a confidence game or other fraudulent scheme, esp. for making a quick profit; swindle.” This would mean the fraudster would have to be using a site for the soul purpose of defrauding the member’s right from the start. Because this has defiantly been the case with many PTC sites in the past it has now caused a paranoia effect where some people jump on this word at the slightest sign.

It has now come to a stage that if a member’s payment goes a day over due that member will then go to a popular PTC community and insists that they were “scammed”. Quite often it’s a cheater who has been caught and just wants to get a last word in but sometimes it is someone simply jumping to conclusions without being objective.

Examples

The most logical example for this growing trend is members on the audit wait at bux.to. It’s a fact that bux.to is the largest and most popular PTC site and therefore has the longest audit waits. For a premium member the TOS states 30 business days after request till you are paid. For standard members it is 60 business days.

With over 6million members last reported it is evident that even these durations are too short for the site to payout on time and they are indeed not making these dead lines. However this does not mean it is a scam. The TOS also states that they cannot be held responsible for work stoppages which are commonly caused by mass support tickets.

This is a nasty cycle because the people who lose patience waiting file a support ticket but then so does another 100,000 that day each requiring an examination of their account. A PTC site is always under pressure to answer their support tickets so they cannot avoid even a low priority ticket while they could be doing a more important process such as payment audits. Audits themselves are a high priority and take a lot of time no matter what you know about PHP. If you have 1 million members asking for payment there are numerous cheat checks required for each.

Simple Answer? Stop taking new members until they are able to cope with the numbers they have. I am one of those complaining I requested payment on 18 Dec 2007 and had sufficient patience not to raise a support ticket until 28 April 2008.

I'm sorry but if they are unable to trade and within their terms and conditions they should be stopped from operating. For my own part I will wait until 28 May 2008 and as the Whois Database gives a .de reference I shall raise the matter with the German Police. If they are stupid enough to fill their pages with "success" stories boasting of $10,000 payments then they deserve to be subjected to rigorous investigation.

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Word from Wordlinx

Cheap Upgrades to End

Sent out as a paid ad to those who choose to take them has been a new entry on the Wordlinx blog. There are to be important changes to the site:

"Over the last few months we have been developing a brand new system to provide more paid adverts for everyone. It's unlike anything you have ever seen before. It has been custom built from the ground up with a unique design and brand new features.

We plan to release the system on May 15th 2008 GMT. As the system will create many more adverts for all members, our Verified membership will increase in price from $5 to $10 per year on May 30th 2008 GMT. This does not affect members who are currently subscribed. Current Verified membership holders will continue to pay $5 per year until they cancel their subscription through PayPal. Only new Verified members will have to pay the new $10 price".

I've been earning quite well on Wordlinx so have decided to take the upgrade. Wow! I was astonished at how many extra ads I got to see. It will only take a month or so to pay for the upgrades and I got 100 ads to go with it. Very good value. If you are not a member of Wordlinx yet get over to it now and take advantage of the cheap upgrade.

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Is The Marketplace Full?

How Many Paid To Click Sites Will Survive?

There seems to be few days pass where we don’t find the launch of a new Paid to Click (PTC) site. Some of them come blazing in with a fanfare, the admin has obviously spotted the need for a wide range of advertising to get the initial members, whilst others enter the market with something of a whimper.

I’m getting very doubtful about the number of sites that can be realistically supported. OK, I know someone reading this is thinking about the Billions of Internet users out there however when a well established site like Donkeymails has only 192,000 users and Adbux boasts of 829,000 members then that really is about the size of user base available at the moment. There will be a continuing trickle of new users but the market is not increasing at the massive rate it was doing so earlier this year.

What then for the future? Plenty of the recent crop of PTC sites including one which has paid me [Eurocent Bux] have, after a bright start, settled down to just 4 or 5 ads per day. I’m beginning to wonder whether it might be in the best interests of both site admins and users to see some mergers in the market leaving us a smaller number of PTC sites but with a greater likelihood of being paid.

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Scam Warning – SebasBux

I should start by saying that I have yet to receive first-hand confirmation that this Paid to Click is a scam but look at the evidence.

Well where does site the name come from? This is clearly an attempt to trade on the name of the very highly regarded Paid to Read site operator Sebas Broekhoff. Sebas has a fully justified fantastic reputation as a site admin – and he always pays on time! The naming of this site seems to be a very cynical attempt to trade on his name. A look at the InterNIC Whois database shows the site owner to be Sebastian Laborda Mas based in Miralcamp, Spain.

The ads? Compare the ads which are available on this site and they bear little resemblance to those on other PTC sites. We have seen this previously – on sites that have folded!

Beware!

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Paid To Read Sites

The Power of PTP

When I first started out with this blog I was trying to see how much money I could make starting with nothing and slowly building up. I started out by signing up to some survey sites; a couple of PTC sites and a single PTR site (OurPTR.com which as you will see later is still one of my favourite sites). Sadly it was not for some months that I realised how wrong I was to not sign up for some PTR sites. Whilst the earnings may not seem too great to begin with if you stick with it you can earn much quicker than with PTC sites – and even better can get two or three pretty much on Auto-pilot.

Anyone who would like to follow my simple formula should as a first step join these three sites:

Donkeymails

Worldwide Cash

No-Minimum

When you join you will receive a confirmation email that will contain a link for you to click on and then you are up and running. In blogs later this week I shall give full instructions for getting the best out of each of these sites.

Each of these sites has PTP as an option and I will give a brief outline of how it operates. If when you have joined the site you select Paid to Promote you will find a link that you can use to advertise the site in the format:

http://www.donkeymails.com/pages/ptp.php?refid=jjlp86

If you click on the link you will see (in a new window) what happens when you click on my PTP link. You should also see that I have not received credit for you viewing the page. Why not? Well this is simply because you are restricted to which sites you can advertise the link on.

Why Bother? In exchange for advertising this page on an authorised site you receive PTP credits and, for example, on Donkeymails you receive $0.75 for each 1000 credits.

So where do you advertise the sites? Initially I would suggest on the other sites mentioned above.

How much does it cost? Well for some time I never paid to place a PTP ad but simply redeemed either points or cash from clicking on the other sites. For instance 625 points on WWC buys you 600 PTP ads that converts to about 100 – 125 Donkeymail PTP Credits.

Why for 600 views might I only get 100 credits? Views are tiered – for instance you may get 1 credit for a view from a person in US, Canada, UK or Australia but as little as 0.05 credits for a view from a person in China!

Before I finish for today I should quickly mention that I do very well out of credits on GetRef.com too!

Go on then – go and join them!

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The Return

After a considerable break I am now ready to update on how I have been making money online. I have four main sources of income none of which will yet make me a millionaire (in any currency) but I have established a regular small income.

Firstly there are the surveys; secondly Paid to Read sites; thirdly Paid to Click sites and finally Afilliate Marketing. Over the next few days I shall outline my main sourses under each of these headings - I will then round up with a look at downline building.

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Paid to Click Delight

Gives Me Some Heart

One of the smaller sites I have been following for a while is EuroCentBux. This has around 2000 members and is bilingual (Anglo-French) offering a small number of ads each day.

Yesterday I spotted a new newsletter and the English was not exactly brilliant - in fact I found it easier to read the French version and I've not used French for many years (about 30!). I contacted the admin asking if he wanted me to tidy it up. This I did.

My next contact was the admin thanking me and offering me a free ad. What a gentleman! We hear so many stories of greed and avarice around online earings I thought it was wonderful to find someone acting so honourably. This has restored my faith somewhat in the industry.


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A Good Day

Daddybux is Back

I was probably the last person to find this out but Daddybux is back and operating normally.

On one of the forums I read it is being suggested that the site was suspended for an unpaid bill. If so it gives a terrible impression to members and advertisers alike but nonetheless it is back so hooray!

Since Daddybux disappeared I have been looking more closely at the terms and conditions of all the PTC sites I have joined and, in effect, they are able to just change things as they like or just take a holiday totally ignoring members. I guess at least the people at thebux.com have mailed members to say they were "updating the system after pre-launch". Will they reappear?

Opinion Bar Surveys

I have long thought that Opinion Bar was a scam but not really aired my views. I got a few surveys to start with and relatively quickly approached the earning threshold of £10. As I approached the threshold my survey invites dried up and I presumed that was that. Today, however, I got a new survey which takes me over the £10 so I have requested payment. It just now remains to be seen whether the money hits my bank account (payment is by Electronic Money Transfer).

Edit: 14 May 2008 And yes in the end I did get paid - surveys here are very very slow coming and the payment is slow too - but it is not a scam!

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Bux.to Bux Back!!

Bux.to Returns

A bland statement saying:

Oct. 08, 2007 - Bux.to domain shut down due to sabotage!

announces the return of Bux.to. It returned at about 13:40 GMT.

The word I am picking up on is that members of the Adbux forums flamed the Bux.to ISP complaining that Bux.to was a scam. Well, Bux.to seem to have satisfied their ISP and they are back up and running - long may it be so!

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Tarbux Scam

I find that after a few days of no ads today we see the old server under maintenance screen - the same as we did with internationalmoneybux.com.

Unfortunately it is impossible to find the owners of the site from a Whois query as they are hidden behind a GoDaddy proxy. Anybody in the States want to have a look?

Chrissy at MFMO is having troubles but is open about what is going on - Support him and seek out the scummy scammers.

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A Bunch of New Paid to Read sites

New Paid to Read

The Adbux clones just keep coming. With ClikBux, EnglandBux, RealBux, CashBux and InternationalMoneyBux among others. You'll notice I'm not joining them all - there's only so much research I can cope with!

The standout for me amongst the recent sites is Adsentive.

This site is a bit different to the rest in that it offers Paid to Read, Paid to Click, Paid to Search, Paid to Sign up and Paid to Promote all under one roof. Payment is available at a low $3 by PayPal or E-Gold. I have joined this and will use all of these options and report back here in the near future.

I have very high hopes of this site!

Make Free Money Online dot info continues to be a really good earner for me. With the revamp of the site there are more clicks available on a daily basis and they seem to be increasing - a very good sign! With the exceptionally low $1 level for payout I am reaching payout level very quickly. I am building a good downline here.

As for other sites I am using getref.com as my downline builder. I was lucky that my blog entry here won me gold membership for this site - I cannot recommend this site highly enough.

Warnings

Bux.to

I am very concerned that recently I have only seen self-generated ads coming from them. I know this could be because of geo-targeting of ads but I am really concerned that this site will not be sustainable for much longer.

AWSurveys Scam

It is worth joining Advercash just to read the testimonies of people who have lost money to AWSurveys. I don't care that you may come across, rarely, posts from people who have been paid - there are many out there that have had a miserable experience.

Please remember I will reject anonymous comments!

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Big PTC Changes

Changes at Adbuddy

Following the recent redesign and other changes at Adbux there are now big big changes at Adbuddy.

08-08-07: Advertising Fee/Member Payout Changes

Many members have voiced their opinions about the lack of ads recently. Unfortunately, we have to agree. What we've learned is that advertisers just don't want to pay 3 to 4 cents per click. The price is too high compared to the return they're receiving. Last month we ran some advertising specials. We ran specials at 2.2 cents per click and 1.2 cents per click. The 2.2 cents per click price point did alright, but the 1.2 cents per click price did much better. This price point made much more sense to advertisers, while providing the largest quantity of ads for members to click. The problem is that a business can't pay out 2 to 2.5 cents per click to members, while only charging 1.2 cents per click to advertisers. The math simply doesn't work out in the long run. So, what do we do? Do we close the site because it's not a viable business model? Or, do we believe it's still a viable business, as long as we change things around a bit? We believe the answer is the later. Effective immediately, here's what we will need to do:

Advertising Fees

In an effort to gain more advertisers, the advertising fees will be lowered to 1.4 to 1.8 cents per click, depending on the quantity purchased. See the AdBuddy.Net advertising page for specific pricing information.

Advertiser Demographic/Geo Targeting

The demographic/geo targeting will remain intact, but it will be relaxed quite a bit. Currently, an advertiser must target at least a minimum of 100 members. We will increase this amount to at least 2000 members. If we need to go higher then we will, but we'll leave it at 2000 for now.

Member Payout

Members will now be paid .5 cent for each advertisement they personally view, and .5 cent for each advertisement their direct referrals view. Upgraded members will earn .7 cents per click on their direct referrals' clicks.

Minimum Payout

The minimum payout will be lowered from $10.00 to $5.00, and payouts will continue to occur on a weekly basis via PayPal.

There are other changes relating to upgraded members etc. However, given the changes at MFMO and Adbux as reality bites what of the future for other 1c PTC sites? Surely we will either see mergers or some biting the dust. Doesn't seem the time to invest in other than Adbux, MFMO or Adbuddy.

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