Sunday, August 29, 2010

A Dying Trend?

Well howdy. It's almost been a month.

What have I been doing? Not much. Lots of relationship stuff.

I've been doing NeoBux, mainly. I'm wanting to do other PTCs
as well, or something else at the least, but it looks like the only
reliable PTC that has a rental system is NeoBux.

Gomez, Swagbucks, and NeoBux. And frankly, the money
so far hasn't exactly been that fast. Money from Swagbucks
has helped here and there, though.

My initial guess regarding NeoBux was to do with the
following calculations:
- 4 clicks per 3 referrals (break-even standpoint)
- How long this would take to reproduce more referrals who, in turn, make me enough money to
- Rent more referrals

A Standard member in NeoBux can have 300 referrals.

My calculation was thus this:

If there is a total and overall average of 4.1 clicks per
3 rentals, then after you make enough profit to rent referrals
and get to 300, you'll make a
daily profit of $8.10, a
monthly profit of $243, and a
yearly profit of $2956.50.

And the time in total to get to this would be
142 days.

Not exactly great, but then, it's a whole lot better
than investing 6 months of excitement, anticipation,
and around $200 into a site like bux.to!

Not too shabby, but indeed based on an assumption,
and an important one:
A 1.37 click ratio.

The next step has been to see what I'd actually get,
and adjust expectations accordingly.

Unfortunately, the ratio I've been getting have been
a lot lower than what would be needed. 1.14, and trending
downward. The reason, of course, is that I'm not recycling.
At all. Mostly because I'm curious of what will happen if
I keep the rental. Will the rental become active? Stay dormant?
For how long?

Since the renew prices have changed, and more types
of renews have been added, I've revised my approach
to being a bit more indecisive as to what to do next.
I both want to have a high average - as high as possible,
and I want to observe clickers. My approach to this before,
I suspect, was to over-recycle. Or maybe it wasn't -
I don't really know.

Additionally, having referrals who don't click - and click
less - is really boring. I'm finding myself less and less interested
in continuing, so I think I've going to soon recycle them,
if not just to make it so I don't lose hope (hey, it's my blog;
I can be melodramatic if I want).

But yeah. Everything otherwise, this internet stuff is
looking pretty shitty. If nothing else, when I get another
job I'll maybe use some extra money to speed the NeoBux
process along and find out this stuff faster, but that's about
all I'd do.

Maybe there aren't any decent PTCs. Or maybe I do just
need to upgrade to Golden, and that will change things.
*shrugs*

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

PTC Relapse... again

Alright. So I said I was done with PTCs, right?
That's what I said however-many-years-ago
after I spent around $200 on bux.to and got
$10 back.

And I was done with PTCs... for about a year or so.
Then I came back to check them out, and found
that NeoBux had started up about 6 months
earlier.

What can I say? I'm a PTC addict. I want an
easy way to make money. It doesn't necessarily
have to be fast, but it does have to be reliable,
and preferably have a high potential. Within
reasonable limits, of course, in order to avoid
wasting an exuberant amount of time, and in
order to avoid getting scammed (Ok, really,
just to make it less likely. In the PTC world,
scam in the norm; you just move on).

For example, the payout has to take less than
something like 60 days - otherwise paypal
won't refund it. I heard that from somewhere.
Makes sense.

Early on I realized that getting direct referrals 
for PTCs was not the way to go. Why?
Because it results in a pyramid scheme.
How? Think of it:
You're trying to get direct referrals so you
can make money. Which means that you're
not making money as it stands. Why would
your direct referrals want to join unless they
could make money? And how would they
make money? Through getting direct referrals.
And how would those referrals make money?
By getting direct referrals.

What a piece of shit. No wonder it's hard
to get direct referrals.

(I got a comment from Cameron on one of
my older posts - the one about NeoBux's
autopay, where he said that he linked the
post to his Top3-Pay-to-Click blog - which
he did. On that same page was the traditional
spreadsheet of direct referral earnings:
... and, my apologies. I mis-saw what
was there. Anyway, I can skim it off of
bux.to's website anyway:

"Earnings Example
» You click 10 ads per day = $0.10
» 20 referrals click 10 ads per day = $2.00
» Your daily earnings = $2.10
» Your weekly earnings = $14.70
» Your monthly earnings = $63.00"

And how does bux.to accomplish this feat?
By using bots: (from PTC-I)
http://img16.imageshack.us/f/bots30547516jq3.jpg/

I'll revisit this in a moment.)

Hence the allure of NeoBux: you rent refs. 
Not buy them, as with bux.to. Not convince
family, friends, and make business cards for
random people you might meet (yes, I did do
that - I got bux.to business cards from Vista
Prints. Wow, right?). But just pay a certain
amount as per which way you decided to
pay (30 days, 60 days, 90 days, autopay...).

The question then becomes: is renting refs profitable?
The answer? I don't know. That's what I'm trying to
figure out. And the answer might be thus:
After two years, with consistent reinvestment to
get more refs until you hit the standard limit of 300,
it won't be profitable. Two years sounds like a long-shot
to me. But seeing as I've spent that much time trying
to find a decent PTC anyway, it just might be something
to consider.

I mean, it's not like I won't still be looking out of curiosity,
even after I've sworn that I've stopped doing PTCs for
here now and forever, so I might as well do NeoBux on
the side. If nothing else, I could spend two years investing
nothing into NeoBux, manage the referrals, and come back
with the report.

So it looks like the key to having a successful referral system
would be to rent referrals. If this can be profitable for those
doing the renting, then the system basically sells itself, and the
direct referrals that would occur from people sharing wouldn't
be people trying to make money off their friends, but money on
top of their intended means of making it.

And that's why I only consider either PTCs that have a ton
of ads to click (at a decent rate, which means at the very
least about $0.0003 per ad), or to have a rental system.
Otherwise it's simply not worth the hassle of weeding through
the 90-99% of PTCs that go bad. Other people can do that,
and then you can search for which PTCs rise to the top,
and maybe include those in your base. Or not. *shrugs*

One thing I really liked about paidtoclick.in was the automated
payments. All I had to do was click, daily, on the ads. It was -
for the most part - a steady stream of income. Yes, it was about
$0.02 per every 3 days, or something like that, but it was reliable.
It was certainly better than $0 per day for looking for more PTCs
that didn't work.

So another method that I employ is that of finding low amounts
in a short period of time. Here, again, is a system where you
could find some direct referrals who might be interested in joining.
And then that could be incremental.

Overall, what have I found so far?
NeoBux, Swagbucks, Gomezpeer, and YouData.
Only one of those is a traditional PTC. I say "traditional"
because technically YouData is a PTC, but its style is
much different from what a PTCer would expect.


So, the second part: What's the problem with renting? 
Accusations of NeoBux using bots usually become posts
that are deleted. Perhaps understandably, since the reaction
to this would be, probably, panic. Things like, "Has NeoBux
finally gone scam" might come up. Then again, perhaps the
admin actually IS using bots, and that's why the posts are deleted.

The problem with renting is that the average tends - or has tended -
to be very low. I guess it doesn't really make sense that the users
are bots, in that way, since, with sites like bux.to, you were pretty much
guaranteed to have a high click rate - but ah, until the ref reaches
around 300 clicks. Then it's a dead fish.

Which is why the craziness of some refs is troubling. It seems,
sometimes, that a referral would be active for a few weeks,
and then the average would just drop, or become non-existent.
This has been what has been behind the almost Tessa-like
declaration from people trying of "Well, you've either got it or you don't."
(Tessa has a scheme where you can take three steps and join a
bunch of stuff and he'll promise you $125. When you complete the
steps, if you don't read the fine print, you realize that you need $200
to cashout. And in order to get that you need to do some heavy
marketing... or... something. Hence, it's a friggin' pain in the ass,
and almost guaranteed to not work if you don't know what you're
doing. I didn't. Lost a few bucks on that...
Reminds me a little of GDI, and GDI reminds me a little of FHTM.
GDI stands for Global Domains International.
FHTM stands for Financial Hi-Tech Marketing.
Both have great referral schemes, but if you don't like the product
(and the products for each isn't so great), then the whole
program falls apart.)

So, I think that'll be my homework to myself (which I'll probably
do out of sheer PTC-addiction), to figure out this renting
referral thing, and how I can make it profitable for myself
and others. Numbers are one thing. Behavior is another animal
entirely. I got about $1.50 built up before I rented 3 refs;
a little lower than is recommended to start, but I sort of just
want to observe the 3 referrals more than anything else.
I was getting bored with just clicking 4 ads per day.

So. There you have it. I'm addicted. :-( :-P
Not to say that I'm not still looking into other
methods. This post is specifically about PTCs
and NeoBux.