[CASE STUDY] The Failure Of Paid.Vg

As you can see from the below post which contain the message wrote by the owner of Paid.Vg and Buxup, it was being deliberated that the business model of Paid-to-click (PTC) is rather a long haul for business or external advertisers. As what was being confessed by a owner of such sites, the promised 20 ads daily is by the own site.

Well, most certainly it is a very negatively played zero sum game at the end of the day. But what I discerned is that currently only Bux.To and Bux3 have advertisements that are unique daily which we can reasonably believed that they are most probably funded by external advertisers. While, Bux.To has more of such advertisements, Bux3 is also being seen to be keeping up with that expectation.

I had lost some money with Paid.Vg and I am currently in the process of claiming for whatever amount that they can give me. You know what people usually says, 'Beggar can't ask for too much'.

Why Paid.Vg failed?
I supposed, in my personal views, Paid.Vg did not failed due to the business model. It was rather the poor support and administrative assurances. Because at the end of the day, most of the external advertisements were being put up by members themselves as what you can see on Bux.To. Well, you may not be able to understand. Put it simply, people started to lose confidence with the site and left. While the more dominant ones kept earning money via referrals. These are the ones that do not advertise and those who potentially may advertise lost confidence and left. Which explain on a certain extend the failure of this PTC.

Well, I will advise online earners to be careful and learn before you earn. Be on the pulse of things, look out for my reviews because I will only recommend sites that I had tried and tested.

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[NEWS] Paid.Vg iHas Officially Ended For Good

This I believed marked the end of Paid.Vg. Below you is the extracted message brought to you by the owner of Paid.Vg, Alex himself.

25th April 2008

I regret to inform you that Paid.vg will now be closing. I didn’t want it to come to this; I know that many users have accused this site of being a scam. I can assure you that my intentions were and are completely legitimate, I wanted Paid.vg to be the perfect PTC site, and I spent a solid month improving the original $30 Bux script. It had many bugs and missing features. I redesigned it to be as clear and fast as I could by fixing the errors, adding new features and giving it a unique design. I know that you can now buy a PTC script for around $40-50 and have your PTC site running in no time at all, but I really put effort into the site in order to make it different and not just another generic buggy Bux site. There is a simple explanation to why Paid.vg and 99% of PTC don’t stay open.

The PTC business model does not work.

I can’t stress that enough. I hope more and more people start to realise this. The list of sites that have closed down with no explanation is endless. Yet the PTC community continue to use PTCs. Paid.vg has stayed open for 6 months. This is longer than most PTCs live, I probably should have realised that the site was failing and closed it much earlier to avoid the problems now, but I was stubborn and believed it could be worked through, I made several attempts at reviving the site with no luck.

Bux Up was launched in order to generate some cash in order to help pay off the requests pending at Paid.vg. I know that a lot of users boycotted Bux Up because Paid.vg owns it; I apologize if it was misleading. Script.vg doesn’t have the demand I thought it might, this will be closed down in the near future and the few that have not received their script yet will receive it by tomorrow.

I would like to move out of the PTC industry, it has been extremely difficult and stressful. I would just like to explain something to those of you who are new to the PTC sites or haven’t really thought about how they work. Essentially, the picture that is created for the user is, the ads you click are funded by advertisers who are external to the site. This is not the case for 99.99% of the PTCs out there, the site may have one or two occasional outside advertisers, but the site itself funds nearly all of the ads. This means that the money paid out to the users is from those who pay for upgrades or referrals. At first launch it may seem like the site is doing well, referrals and upgrades are bought in abundance, however after a few weeks or months the payment requests start flooding in. The requests eventually amount to more then is being earned by the site.
I apologize if you are a dedicated PTC user, some of the things I have said may not be exactly what you want to hear. I am sure 99% of you will continue to use PTCs as normal and I am sure it provides a small income for many of you, but in the end the model doesn’t work and there are always people who lose out.

I am glad that Paid.vg never expanded as quickly as Bux.to. Bux.to is a ticking time bomb that is waiting to go off. It is far bigger than any PTC should ever be.

What happens next?
I have created a temporary forum available here for the next few days. I will be on to answer any good questions. A section will also be available for those of you who feel you are the worst off. If you explain clearly then this may improve you chances of being reimbursed for any lost money. Please do not abuse the temporary forum; there is no point if it is not used constructively. The $3,120 remaining in my account will be used to pay those who have lost out from Paid.vg. Those who have either lost nothing or profited from Paid.vg will take the least priority. This page and the temporary forum will be taken down once as many issues have been fixed as possible. Bux Up will only display ads from external advertisers from now on, which may mean fewer ads, but a more reliable and long lasting site. Like I said before, I would like to leave the PTC area, I will definitely not be opening any more PTCs, however I will keep Bux Up open. It should be a long lasting site, as external advertisers will fund it. But unfortunately most PTC users have become accustomed to the 8-20 ads available a day at PTC sites, which Bux Up simply won’t be able to compete with. However, I realise now, slow and steady wins the race.

If you have read this entire message I appreciate that, I realise it is quite long, I tried to keep it concise as possible. I truly apologize for any issues that Paid.vg has caused and I hope that I am able to cover your losses over the next couple of days.

Alex

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[ARTICLE] Best ways to make money using the Internet

Many users of the Internet are currently being exposed to online money making opportunities frequently from advertisements, be it from sites which they had visits or the side bar of a search engine. The exposure is currently at a very unbelievable level which had attracted many into believing that the site advertising can really make them some money. While it is also a very repent thing to receive spam mails that claim that you can make thousands of dollars a day by joining them, had also expanded the publicity grounds made by these money making schemes and sites.

There are many ways to make money using the Internet. The basic revenue earning principal used by these programs or sites is based on traffics and advertisements. So is it fair to say that Internet is a advertisement driven world? Well, I believed so personally. Whilst there may be people from a different quadrant may already have the impression that such advertisements are all scams and they are simply just "too good to be true". Well, it is a big yes as well as a no. If you were to understand how these programs or sites generate that income, you would not have that impression in your mind anymore, believe me. Some of such sites declared that they can make you one hundred thousand in a week. These are the site that is unreasonably exaggerating and simply do not make sense. So it can be easily discerned. Before embarking on a quest to make money using the Internet using the best and the safest ways, you need to understand what are the programs that are available in the current context of online earning.

Paid To Click
This is the most popular online earning program since early last year when Adbux started the impressive system that allow members to click advertisements for a rate of one cent. However, more and more competition came along and the current best site providing this would be Bux. Paid to click, also known as PTC offers advertiser the chance to put their advertisements up for members to view for a stipulated time of generally thirty seconds. This gives advertisers a chance to show case their product of services to the members. An interesting idea of letting members to buy referrals came along and there are many people out their earning thousands of dollars with the help of their purchased down-line. Currently, there are many PTCs out there competing for this advertising markets. We have been seeing a few failures and some success. The most important thing to note is to learn about the sites before investing money into such sites. The program that you want to earn money for you have to possess good reviews and track records of paying their members to avoid becoming a victim of scams.

1 Paid to Read
This online earning program is also known as PTR works by sending you links to click on for a stipulated time before you get credited with the reward. The reward is generally lower than PTC due to the cheaper advertising rate offers to the advertiser. Some example of such sites are Donkeymails and No-Minimum.

2 Get Paid to Blog
You are required to blog about the advertisers usually by writing an article with unique contents. Users of this program are usually paid from $6 to as high as $10 typically for each article that they had posted on their respective blogs. Some good sites offering such program are Smorty, Blogvertise and Payperpost. There are even people that does this for a living by managing many blogs to increase their chances of getting such tasks. The key advantage of such programs for the advertisers is that it increases their online presence and publicity. This dramatically increases the chance of their advertisements to be seen by surfers when they start to searched for related anchor texts with search engines like Google, Yahoo and so on.

3 Get Paid to Discuss
This is a very interesting get paid to program. We all know that there are a limit to the traffic or page views that a blog can generally generates. Forums are usually the one that tends to generate more page views due to the amount of rich content that it accumulated with the help of the discussions made by its users. Based on the same principle, get paid to discuss site like MyLot had been a very popular choice these days for earning online just by starting a thread of discussion or posting responses. It is basically a revenue sharing program.

4 Get Paid to Write
Like Helium, Associate Content and what have you are paid to write site. It work the same way as get paid to discuss as they are also a revenue sharing program. That is to say the page views generated by unique users that boosted the click per 1000 impressions or CPM will earn these sites their income. The specific formula on how the money was duly distributed is unknown, but it is quite fair based on my personal experiences.

5 Get Paid to Search
Well, this is relatively new to the online earning community. It is basically a search engine like Google or Yahoo, but the only difference here is that such get paid to search site like MySearchFunds pays you to use the search engine on a per search basis. While, I believe it is more worthwhile to be paid to search than to search for free. But the trade off is that the search results generated are not as comprehensive as what you get from Google or Yahoo. But you know what they say, "you gain some, you lose some".

6 High Yield Investment Program
Or also known as HYIP is a very risky program to joined. You need to invest a sum of money in such sites and chances are most of them are scams. There are such sites that are paying, but usually not for a very long period of time. But the key is that, join when it is new and do not reinvest thereafter. Earned your target income and try not to look back.

7 Freelance
For this particular program, you need to have certain level of skills to get freelance jobs. The more commonly bid freelance jobs on such freelancing sites are copywriting, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) writing and programming.

After having understand the variations of the online earning programs that are available in the virtual world of Internet, you need to know what is the best ways to make money using the Internet.

Avoid Scams
You need to be able to distinguish a genuine site from a scam site. But how? Well, those that claims to make astronomic figures are those that to be avoided. If a program requires you to pay a sum of money for you to become a member, it is recommended that you give them a miss. Check for scam sites with www.scams.com or PTCtalk.com. There are many information that you need made available in these two sites.

Getting Started
In order for you to get started. Choose a few programs and joined them. You need to be concurrent here because you are just starting out, you need to make some money in the shortest time that you could. I would recommend PTC because it will not take very long for you to accumulate payout of $10. Usually, it will take about one or two months.

Start a Blog
You will need this a lot. Write reviews on the PTC sites that you have joined in trying to gain some visitors that will eventually joined the programs as your referrals to expedite your earnings. At this juncture, you may also go for some online freelance job if you have the required skills. At the same time, you may also want to post some advertisements from Adsense and Adbrite to earn some page views income.

Join Get Paid to Blog
Now you should be quite familiar with blogging and it is time to get some tasks and post the advertising articles to earn some quick money. These are the sites that generally pays on time.

Join Get Paid to Write
With no time to waste, start to join sites like Helium and Triond to gain more money. There are a wide range of topics for you to choose from. Similarly, you can also write about your experience in the earning online scene.

Leverage
Use programs like Facebook, Stumble, Dig it, Yahoo bookmark, Google tabs and so on to increase the exposure of your written articles to gain more chance for you to earn more income. You may also want to post all the titles which linked to your actual articles on your blog to gain that rich content that may increases your page rank. This is leveraging both ways to optimize your earning potential.

Invest
At this juncture, you should probably have some money. use all of it or most of it to buy referrals from the PTC site that you feel that it is the more worthwhile. Personally, I would go for Bux as it is the largest PTC at present. With this, you are already opening a door to a constant passive income that does not requires you to do anything at all.

Re-invest
The key to make more money is to reinvest the money being earned from various program back to buy more referrals from one of the PTC programs. It works for me and that is why I had come up with this strategy.

Of course, it is still up to you whether to reinvest the money earned or not because at the end of the day it is your money. However, I believe in a structured approach to make money using the Internet, you need to have a target of passive income that you want to earn. I have not hit my target of $1000 a month yet, but I am only about $200 short. So the choice is ultimately yours. It worked for me, so I believe it should work for you as well.

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