Desktop, well, pennies (desktopdollars .com site))
Written: Jun 21 '00 (Updated Aug 17 '00)
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| Full Review |
Desktop Dollars (DD) is yet another Pay-to-surf (PTS) company that started out promising more than it could deliver, attracted a good following, then took a hit when they broke reality to their members and has been continuing to decline in credibility.
The site is somewhat slow, but navigable. Download is reasonable. Installation is smooth, but it sets itself up to come on during startup, which is always a pet peeve of mine concerning PTS. This can be fixed by going to the start menu folder and removing the DD icon, yet this is one hassle that could and should be eliminated. The bar is large with some unnecessary features on it. Ads flash reasonably consistently and a maintenance click is required only about every 20-25 minutes - very low maintenance. Downtime was not been a large problem until early June, then despite upgrades, the bar has had considerable problems running.
Customer service started out pretty decent until early June, not so coincidentally the same time the bar began to run unreliably. Their representative who occasionally posts in the Delphi AIC Forum is somewhat lacking in PR skills, but usually is willing to address an issue and attempt to make right to the best of her (albeit limited) abilities.
The weakest link is pay, which declined from .25/hr to .10-.13/hour in May and June to its current rate of just over .07/hour. They have attributing this to a proliferation of cheaters who have found a way to defeat the maintenance clicking. This "cheat bleat", however, has been going on since May and the argument is wearing thin. One thing I have noticed is that when the bar DOES run, there is not a large variety of ads. This problem is not unique to DD, but other companies freely admit that the ad market is down right now. DD seems to completely avoid this and continues to use the cheat bleat defense. All eyes have been on their pay performance for the past couple months, and many of these eyes have begun to roam elsewhere for a bar that pays better.
The referral structure pays down through 6 levels with direct referrals kicking back 1/3 of the direct rate. Another positive is that if your referrals surf more hours than you do, you get credit for all their time over and above your surf time, which is somewhat rare in the PTS world. The problem is convincing others to surf which is difficult considering the aforementioned pay and reliability issues. Seven cents an hour is not an enticing sum.
There used to be two unfortunate categories that most PTS companies fall into: either their bar works great but the pay sucks (paybar, cashsurfers, onesrc), or the bar is constantly down or buggy but the payrate is good (AllAdvantage, PaidForSurf, GetPaid4). DD once was a member of the first category, but is now creating a dubious third category - buggy, unreliable bar with terrible pay.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
driver4t5
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 - Top 500 |
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Member: Jon Harney
Location: Lake Mary, FL
Reviews written: 147
Trusted by: 223 members
About Me:
2000 - 2001 Epinions Fixture...Now living off of my Eroyalties Millions
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