Social Paycheck Review: Ad driven social network
If you visit the Social Paycheck website there’s not a lot you can do. A basic description of the compensation plan is displayed (along with a tacky robot voice video), some (mostly broken) information links are at the bottom of the page and big login/register buttons appear in the top right corner of the site.
There is no information on the site itself indicating who owns or runs the business or what exactly the opportunity is about.
The FAQ page solely focuses on how members can make money, as does the infographic on the Social Paycheck homepage.
The company’s domain (“socialpaycheck.com”) was registered on the 17th of September 2012 and lists “Randy Major” as the owner, along with an address in the US state of Utah.
Major’s past MLM ventures appear to be restricted to the launch of an MLM social network called “Treehouse Social”.
Treehouse Social appears to have been launched around late 2011. Advertised by Major (photo right) as “the social network that pays you to be social“, Treehouse Social appears to have been hacked sometime after launch, which resulted in the site being pulled offline permanently.
I’m not sure when this classified ad was posted (possibly March 2012), but in it Major explains why Treehouse Social was pulled offline and outlines plans to build what I believe is now Social Paycheck:
Hello, My name is Randy Major. My partner and I have a website called treehousesocial.com … I few days ago it was hacked into and a good amount of damage was done to the database via SQL Injection a few months before someone was able to switch users via session hijacking and that was fixed.
The site was pulling in $300-$500 per month. My partner and I have come up with six improvements to increase traffic, referrals, time on site and the revenue that the site makes. I am looking to bring in 3 new partners in this venture. We want to improve the site, add a new name and graphics and re launch under that new name.
If you are interested please email me back and we can Skype and see if we can fit (fix?) this together. The site treehousesocial.com was up and running and is not anymore depending on the partners we should be pulling income in within 2 months.
Read on for a full review of the Social Paycheck MLM opportunity.
The Social Paycheck Product Line
Social Paycheck has no retailable products or services. Instead, members sign up to the company’s social network (for free) and earn a share of the advertising revenue the site brings in.
No information or details about the Social Paycheck social network is provided on the company’s website.
The Social Paycheck Compensation Plan
The Social Paycheck compensation plan primarily revolves around the redistribution of advertising revenue the site brings in amongst its members.
As far as I can tell members appear to be detached from the advertising revenue generation process, with the company managing this side of the business themselves.
Currently the Social Paycheck website displays Google Adsense ads, it is unknown if the company runs its own advertising network. There is an “advertise” link present on the company website, however it just redirects back to the main homepage.
Advertising revenue is generated when members visit the website (pay per impression) and interact with Social Paycheck’s displayed ads (pay per click).
This revenue is then distributed amongst members equally, with more “shares” of the advertising revenue allocated to members who have recruited new members.
New members are put into a downline using what Social Paycheck refer to as “a matrix”. Given their description of the matrix though,
As of now every single person that uses your referral link or referral ID number will go on your first level.
I believe it’s more likely to be a unilevel compensation structure. A matrix caps the amount of member positions on the first level of the matrix, whereas a unilevel is unlimited width.
In anycase, it seems the more members you have in your downline, the larger percentage of advertising revenue the Social Paycheck will allocate to you.
Advertising revenue is paid out as follows:
- 5% split amongst all members equally (regardless of members recruited)
- 45% is paid out to members based on how many members they have recruited
The remaining 50% is kept by Social Paycheck.
Joining Social Paycheck
Membership to Social Paycheck is free.
Conclusion
With membership being free and all revenue generated via advertising, the sustainability of Social Paycheck naturally hinges on the company’s ability to attract advertisers to the website.
Currently this appears to be done via Google Adsense, however I don’t see that lasting long. Social Paycheck members have a direct vested interest in the advertising revenue generated by the site, which no doubt creates a conflict of interest with user interaction with the advertising displayed on the Social Network website.
Simply put, the more the site’s members click on the ads (or generate page impressions), the more they get paid.
Value to the advertiser? None.
For this reason I doubt Social Paycheck is going to survive in the long-term. There just isn’t any value for advertisers to display advertising on a website full of members looking to earn money via advertising, rather than out of a genuine interest in the advertising they’re being shown.
Looking at the Social Paycheck website, it’s clear that the income opportunity overshadows the social aspect of the site as no information on the social network is present. Instead, prospective members are lured in solely the prospect of potential income:
You can make an unlimited amount of money on Social Paycheck, it all depends on how many members that you refer.
The best way to earn is to build a downline.
Indications of a lack of advertiser interest are already evident, with the company revealing in a newsletter that the advertising revenue generated by the company equated to ‘about $.009 per referral. Totaling about $.05 per referral for the month‘.
Given the nature of the website, the lack of value offered to advertisers and how Social Paycheck members are paid, I don’t see this increasingly significantly anytime soon.
Update 19th March 2013 – I’m not sure exactly when it happened but Social Paycheck has closed its doors.
The following notice has been published on the Social Paycheck website:
SPC is sorry to inform everyone that we are no longer operating.
Due to losing our Google contract, we no longer have the income to operate.
Offering affiliates commissions via advertising revenue and displaying ads on the website your affiliates are browsing?
As predicted in the review conclusion above, that didn’t turn out too well.
Google Adsense bans members who has absurd amount of click-thrus.
This had happened many times on Youtube, where apparently some well-meaning members decided to click on an ad on EVERY video the uploader had uploaded, to “help the guy out”. This results in the uploader getting BANNED as it’s effectively shilling.
It’s also absurdly easy to create a “social networking site”… You can buy a script for $300, or use one of the free ones. Then it’s just the server hosting. Wazzub was example that went nowhere.
It’s legal, but it’s unlikely to head anywhere for any significant length of time.
You know what’s sad is that with Facebook having a new reason for users to hate them about every day, there is a possibility for a social networking site to take some members from them. Without the MLM junk, this could be a sustainable business.
G- Google+ tried that. In fact many of my FB friends and I did migrate to Google+. But we were back at FB the next day.
Not saying that another social network won’t replace FB someday, it probably will. But it’s going to something that has a lot of the same features the FB offers.
Review updated with news of Social Paycheck being shut down.
Well well.. It appears from this article that Mr. Major had was involved in yet another scheme before turning his attention to a handmade soap business.
I’ve been combing the internet trying to discover who he really is – sounds like a get rich quick sort of guy who doesn’t think things through. Oh – and did I mention? He’s violating my copyright right now?
Yeah, an entire 640 word article that I wrote for my site, and posted at barsoapnatural.com/natural-soap/ surprisingly appears on his soap website, kingsoap.com/whynatural.php.
I spoke with him yesterday, and he all but blamed the copyright infringement on his “developer” who he would “have to get with.”
Well, the content is still there, but with my reports filed with Google and GoDaddy, hopefully that site will also come to an end. Mr. Major needs to clean up his act, and I don’t think selling soap is going to do that for him, based on what I’m reading about him online!!
Randy Major is an well know bastard and scammer. He want to steal money from everything and from everyone. He promise things only to have money and then don’t give nothing or change everything with various excuses.
It is not occasionally that everything he do last very less and after he find excuses to justify the “failure”. Meanwhile he has taken all the money from the “partners” or the people who believed him.
I think that is not enough all the soap of the world to wash its dirt.