All Advantages go to THEM
Written: Dec 11 '00
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I signed up for this program early this year - let's call it February. I had more than one person tell me it was a decent way to get paid to surf, and since I spend a lot of time on the Internet I figured I might be rolling in Epinions-sized dough in no time.
Unfortunately, I could not have been more wrong.
AllAdvantage.com is a site that claims they'll pay you to surf the web. All you have to do is download their software and install it, and it will track your movements online and allow you to get paid. Sounds pretty simple, only their real gig is trying to get you to build-your-own pyramid scheme: you are strongly encouraged to get your friends and family to sign up and suffer so that you can leech a bit of cash based on their surfing activities. Then those friends/family that want to take their frustrations out on other naive referrals will have those second-generation referrals kicking a bit back to them, and an even smaller bit back to you.
Why my mean-spirited rhetoric? Because for some reason I felt an impulse to kick this whiner when it was down. As soon as I signed up, the pay structure changed. The payouts were smaller and the amount you'd have to accumulate to get them to cut you a check was higher. The maximum amout of money I could now accumulate in a month was somewhere in the neighborhood of seven dollars and fifty cents. Gee, good thing I didn't quit my day job in anticipation of web riches! My chances of ever seeing a plugged nickel dwindled away in the distance.
I call AllAdvantage.com a "whiner" because it was at this time that I started receiving "personal messages from the AllAdvantage CEO." At first, I was flattered - could this really be an e-mom and e-pop organization? I replied to the first couple of messages with my thoughts but didn't receive any response. Ah, well, guess it's run by bots. Bots that carefully craft the wording of their communiques to make it sound like they really care but they just can't be expected to pay out as much money as they used to. Sounds like some VCs yanked the plug after the lucky few who were first in the door got rich.
Hmm...also sounds like a pyramid scheme to me, and the more apologetic they got the more I felt I was being screwed. I think the only thing AllAdvantage is missing now is an FTC investigation - they promised me one thing, and gave me another. Eventually, I got tired of all the e-mail announcements that kept whittling away at the pay structure, and just quit using the software. The package not only corrupted my system, but kept a piece of my screen real estate whether I was online or not - you're supposed to just pretty much say goodbye to 25% of your monitor and pretend all your apps are in widescreen, but I got tired of all my programs having banner ads thanks to this in-your-face screen hog.
Did I mention that AllAdvantage's software also wreaked havoc on my machine? In the first week I had to go and download yet another update, and on at least one more occasion the software notified me that I needed another download. I also had to completely remove and re-install it twice. Keep in mind that this was over the course of a mere few months.
In the midst of all this, AllAdvantage's robotic CEO sent me a heartfelt missive, claiming to "have problems tracking users", so a lot of my surfing time just simply disappeared; I traveled out to the site after my first month only to find not one penny more in the second month. And believe me, I surfed a lot, folks.
Overall lesson learned? If it sounds too good to be true, well it still is, even if there's a ".com" at the end of the name. Keep that in mind whenever anyone tells you that advertisers will pay you to surf the web. The only satisfaction I will have is if I can warn as many people as possible away from this crooked deal and somehow make more than $7.50 on this Epinion in the process - then I'll feel like I stuck it to the man. ;)
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
Pyanfar
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Location: Frankfort, KY
Reviews written: 168
Trusted by: 78 members
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