Pay to click: is it really worth it?

Today I will be reviewing what seems to be the XXI century plague: the pay to click systems. The basic notion is that you are paid to watch a set of advertisement links for a certain period of time. After you do so, you get a credit of a few dollar cents in your account and additionally, when you reach a certain minimum amount of balance in your account you can ask for a checkout.

Now, when I said a few dollar cents, it really is a few dollar cents, as in usually you get paid $0.01 for each page-view which is a pretty meagre amount. Add this to the fact that at best, you get 10 to 20 ad-links to click upon (this varies between PTC systems) and it does not take a genius to do the math and know that you will not be making that much profit out of this system.

So why is it so widespread and why do people adhere to these systems so massively?

Mostly because there is more to it. All of the pay to click systems have a referal system. Actually, this is what keeps them in business.

Referrals work in the following way: for each referral I have, I will also earn a certain amount of money for each click they make. On some PTCs this amount is actually the same as the amount I get for my own clicks, but on some systems this amount is downsized.

Typically it will be hard to find a decent amount of referrals. It will be hard to find an amount big enough to actually render you more than just one or two dozens of dollars, but once again, most or all the PTC systems have a system to fight this: a referral market. Basically, you just buy referrals for money, and then it will be like if those referrals had in fact registered on that PTC site with your name as their referral. Do you see where this is getting now?

Let us consider the following scenario: you are consistently getting 5 ad-links per day, each will give you $0.01, so you on your own make $0.05 per day. Now, you had some spare money and bought 1000 referrals. Each of those referrals will also have the 5 links and they will also click on them; as a result, for each click, it will be as if you had clicked as well, so on the first day here’s how much you will make:

5 * 0.01 * 1000 = $50

Sounds better than a simple $0.05 per day, does it not? With an income like that, you can expect something in the order of $1500 per month, give or take.

Maybe at this point some people who did not know about pay to click systems are jumping up and down, wanting to take the plunge and jump right into the scene, but I am sure that many other readers will be skeptical. I know that the first question that came to my mind when I was introduced to this system was: where does the money come from?

Easy. It comes from advertisers who pay a fee to the PTC systems, so that they will publish their advertisements as part of the ad-links. Usually the advertisers pay an amount per page-views (i.e. per amount of times their link was clicked) which is just slightly higher than the amount of money that we, clickers, get for clicking – allowing for huge profit for PTC owners.

So now that you know their source of income, are you still skeptic? If you are, you are rightfully so. The essential fail on these systems is how saturated the web is with them; so much that the advertisers are in fact…. other PTC companies! No matter how much you look around, you will always find that PTC Site A has ad-links for PTC sites B, C and D – and the site B has links for A, C and D and so on… So in reality, this is actually a mangle of websites linking to one another, using profits of theirs to feed the profits of their “opponents” and we get to a point where we are recycling money between companies, in a very closed system, where the only fresh money that gets in, is actually money put in by clickers.

Why don’t real, honest, business companies want to advertise in PTC websites? Simple: whoever is in the PTC deal as a clicker, simply isn’t in it for watching the ads. People will click the ad, keep browsing until the timer runs down, then close that tab, click the next ad and continue the process. This simply does not serve the purpose of advertising. Companies advertise their products in the hopes of increasing their sales, because people will look at their ads and feel the urge to buy their products or to subscribe their services. This simply does not happen when people are in it for the money!

It is somewhat transitive: people click the ads but do not buy. Since people do not buy, the companies do not get the expected income. Let us face it, when a company invests X money in advertising, they are expecting an income of X+Y where they get back the amount they spent, plus a profit. If this profit does not appear, the companies will be less inclined towards advertising and they stop publishing their ads and it all crumbles like a building being demolished.

This is the crux of the PTC systems having failed over and over and over. They are doomed to fail because the notion is flawed to begin with. The punch-line is: why being advertised at for free, whilst you can be get paid to watch advertisements?

Well, this is all really pretty, but you will never be looking at ads from real companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, Google or even of popular online games like World of Warcraft or EvE Online. Instead, you will be looking at ads from companies who also make a living out of PTC deals.

So yeah, I am indeed registered on a few PTC sites and I do click regularly on all of them, but at this point, they are all self-managed. I get profit from PTC, I use it to buy referrals and hopefully at some point I will be leeching the money of people who have invested and given up. Truth is that to make big bucks in this sort of business, you must have big bucks to start with, and they must be disposable. It must be something like venture capital; money that you can simply lose, because there is a high risk involved. There is a risk of it not paying out as well as you expected, or simply the risk of the PTC company going bankrupt and then you have nothing. It has happened the past, many many companies in this field have gone belly-up and then, all those who had invested the big bucks are all of a sudden wiped out.

Obviously, if the company lives long enough for you to make enough profit, so that it gets to be auto-recyclable, then it might be a good deal, but still with a very risky launching pad.

So, in sum, it really isn’t worth it unless you invest at least some money and if you do invest, do be ready to lose the money. You might hit jackpot in the long run, but the most likely ending is that you get no profit and you say goodbye to your money. Truth is: it is not something you can live from. If you had the starting money so that it could become good enough to live from it, then you are probably rich enough to not need this sort of programs to make a living and you will stay out of it.

This is the core of pay to click websites, although there are some new services out there coming up with new innovative strategies that at a first glance, they all look like perfect ways to get more money. Still, none change the fact that these systems are all like a closed environment. Very little money gets in and tons of money seem to be getting out, not to mention the profit that the companies involved make.

To finalize, if you want to make really good money, start your own pay to click service and when you have a few thousand bucks in balance, run away with it and never show up again 😛 otherwise, you might join the few poor ones and help out a bloke by trying out the service. These two services seem to be the most credible and faster payers out there. Be careful though, do not join every PTC service out there. Services like bux.to are simply a no-go due to it taking months from the time you ask for your money until you actually get it.

So if you want to give it a try, just click on these banners and get started. It is not much hard. 🙂