pxsense-logoRemember a few years back there was that story doing the rounds about ‘The Million Dollar Homepage’?

For those that can’t, the basic idea was that back in 2005, Alex Tew created a website that sold advertising space. His website was essentially a giant advertising billboard featuring advertising space in the form of pixels.

Featuring 1 million pixels for sale at a cost of $1 each, following extensive media coverage of the idea, Tew managed to sell all one million pixels and net himself a cool one million.

Given that it was the idea itself behind The Million Dollar Homepage that attracted people and the fact that this idea could easily be replicated, within days (hours?) clone sites popped up trying to replicate Tew’s success.

Naturally, one the phenomena of the idea itself wore off, these sites became a dime a dozen and the concept lost all momentum (the success of Tew’s original site aside).

Fast forward six years and although one would think they’re a little late to the party, PxSense seek to combine the pixel advertising model with MLM.

Read on for a full review of the PxSense MLM opportunity.

The Company

PxSense reveal no information on their website about who owns or who runs the company.

The PxSense domain (pxsense.net) was registered on the 12th October 2011 and the registration information is set to private.

Further investigation into the owners of PXSense however reveals that the company apparently operates out of Sweden, with a ‘Christer Edvin’ claiming ownership.

Who Christer Edvin is and what his history (if any) in Network Marketing and MLM is though, remains unclear.

As always, if a MLM company is not upfront and open about who owns the business and who is running things, be extremely cautious when deciding whether or not to join the company and/or hand them over any money.

The PXSense Product

As mentioned earlier, PXSense sell advertising space on their giant virtual pixel based billboard.

With the PXSense model, each pixel is 16×16 pixels in size and advertisers can purchase these pixels at a cost of 10 per pixel (the more pixels you purchase, the bigger your advertising space).

Once purchased, PXSense promise you a return of 150% of your advertising spend, at which point your pixels expire.

PXSense claim that ‘this usually takes 75 days‘. The company also seem to be dubiously guaranteeing this return by stating

we give 2% daily income on all of your PXP™ Units, for duration of 75 days.

on their FAQ. ‘We give’ certainly sounds like a 2% guaranteed ROI to me.

There is also a retail option available to advertise, which PxSense are calling ‘Rent-a-Pixel’. If you’re not interested in the investment commission, advertising pixels can be rented at 50 cents a day each with a 7 day minimum term purchase ($3.50 per pixel).

Note: At the time of publication (December 29th, 2011), the retail offering is not available to the general public. As it stands, you cannot purchase advertising on PxSense without joining the company and participating in the compensation plan.

The PxSense Compensation Plan

The PxSense compensation plan can essentially be boiled down into two components –

Pixel Advertising Return on Investment

Upon joining PxSense members can purchase pixel advertising from PxSense, which they then inturn display until revenue has been generated to provide the advertiser with a return on investment (ROI) of 150% of their original advertiser spend.

Simply explained, if you purchased $100 of advertising pixels from PxSense they’d keep showing your advertisement until they had 150% of $100 ($150) to pay you back out with.

In the above scenario, as an advertiser you’d walk away with $50 profit.

PxSense also use a unilevel structure to pay out residual commissions on advertiser spend.

A unilevel structure means that for each person you personally recruit to PxSense, they are placed directly underneath you. This makes up your first level.

Any members those you’ve directly recruited recruit themselves, make up your second level. Any members they recruit, your third and so on and so forth.

Using the above unilevel structure, PxSense pay out 10% on your first level (people you directly recruit) advertiser spend and 5% on your second level (people you direct recruits bring into the company) advertiser spend (not the 150% return).

Promotion Commissions

In addition to the advertising investment commissions, PxSense also offer members promotion commissions for advertising the site.

PxSense’s promotion commissions revolve around what they call ‘credits’. 1000 PxSense credits = $1 USD.

To earn credits, PxSense members must promote the pixel advertising pages via a referral link.

For each unique visitor a referral link brings to the pixel advertisement pages, members earn 0.1 credit points. A click on an advertisement from one of these visitors generates 1 credit point for the referer.

Like the Advertising ROI, PxSense’s promotion commissions also pay out 10% and 5% on a member’s first and second level unilevel referrals respectively.

Joining PxSense

Joining PxSense is free, although PxSense request that all members ‘please use GMAIL account for registering‘.

Note that for some reason, those wishing to participate in the promotion commision component of PxSense’s compensation plan, must obtain SMS verification before doing so.

Promoters are required to get an instant and easily obtained approval.

After registration, click on “Request PTP Approval” link in members area, where you will be asked to provide your real mobile number so the verification code can be sent to you via SMS.

Once you have received your secret activation code, you may enter it and get your account approved automatically.

This service presumably works worldwide.

Conclusion

PxSense strenuously deny that it ‘is not an HYIP or investment site‘, yet due to the mechanics of its flagship product, pixel advertising and compensation plan,  effectively operates as one.

Why?

For starters, PxSense’s pixel advertising page is a joke. Here’s how it currently looks:

What you’ll notice is that it’s just a bunch of grey and blue squares. Blue squares are purchased advertising whereas grey squares are unpurchased.

PxSense claim that

On our Pixel Page, each link/spot is represented with “favicon” of advertised domain name (if available) otherwise simply a colored 16×16 spot.

At the time of publication I count 58 purchased $10 ad pixels, none of which are displaying favicons.

Furthermore each advertising link reveals nothing about the URL being advertised. All advertisement pixels use a url template of ‘http://www.pxsense.net/p//?id=PX-XXXX’ where XXXX is the advertiser tracking ID of the PxSense member whose ad it is.

As it stands now, the PxSense advertising billboard is a bunch of blue and grey squares with no way of knowing what is being advertised unless you click on one of the little blue squares.

Why is this important?

This is supposed to be advertising.

For starters, Px-Sense’s pixel advertising page is not going to be indexed by search engines, there’s nothing to index!

For online advertising to be effective you need traffic and for traffic there has to be some sort of incentive to visit the page.

What incentive is there for people to visit a page filled with little blue and grey squares?

PxSense do have a promotion program true, but how exactly do you market a page that is just blue and grey squares?! And even if there was logos or favicons or whatever displayed on the pixel billboard, how exactly do you drive traffic to it?

From an advertiser standpoint, with dozens of sites being advertised on the page it’s a targeting nightmare. How do you advertiser a bunch of squares without mentioning the income opportunity attached to the site?

Thus organic demand for the advertising at PxSense is non-existent, so what do you have left?

A bunch of people pumping money into the system and in 75 days or so, walking away with a 150% return.

Secondly, in order to pay out 150% advertising spend ROIs, PxSense have to generate more in revenue than advertisers are spending. 150% more if the company was to make no profit and they didn’t have any additional commissions to pay out, but becuase they do it’s more than 150%.

The only source of revenue PxSense has is advertiser spend (which currently all comes from members participating in the 150% ROI scheme).

Even if we factor in the retail advertiser revenue source (which is currently non-existent), advertising revenue still makes up 100% of the total revenue of PxSense.

So what’s the conclusion? PxSense need to continually get people to purchase advertising at a rate of greater than 150% than those who have already purchased advertising within the company.

Given that we’ve already established the advertising side of PxSense is absolutely useless, what we’ve got is people investing money into a useless product and hoping for a 150% return over 75 days.

In other words, PxSense is little more than a 150% ROI club and despite the company’s claims, is extremely high risk.

If PxSense fail to attract anything less than 150% of total advertiser spend over any given 75 day period, the entire scheme is going to collapse in on itself.

The larger PxSense gets and the more invested in advertising, along with whatever promotional commissions (and the unilevel matching commissions) they need to pay out too only means that over time, the risk of not meeting that 150% 75 day target only increases.

Given that you can’t sustain 150% returns indefinitely, I don’t give PxSense too long before it falls apart.