When I joined Readbud in April, little did I know about scammers & their tactics. I am grateful to Readbud for having taught me how scammers operate & thrive. At that point in time in April, Readbud Reviews were all very rosy. In fact there were a couple of payment proofs even floating around. Honestly it was so easy to get carried away, that I did not even bother to google for "Readbud Scam" then. It was well upto three months down the line & I happily continued clicking away daily. By then even my partner had joined readbud and together it seemed to be fun. Actually, that was the time when the real fun began. Articles began to dwindle, every week readbud was upgrading servers and literally everyday they were yelling away at members to click their ads. There were enough signs for even a blind guy to know what was happening. It started taking enormous time to make any money. Well by then, since we had made close to $40, (we almost knew that Readbud is Scam) we thought we might as well continue it. Whats the harm, its just another $10 or so & we will be done & cashed out in no time. Both our accounts well past 30days since cashout and you want to know the outcome. Yes, we did cashout, and it took us ONLY four months to accomplish $10 and cashout. But, who said cashout meant getting paid ? Here cashout was a way of discovering ones foolishness. It was a way of confirming it rather. Who said Readbud Scammed us ? We went to them & got kicked in the butt ? Nice & proper. Even though we had started creating a noise on the forums as early as June and knew all along that we were being scammed, it was difficult to leave it at that and look elsewhere. We wanted to see for ourself & know for sure whats happening. The hard way is how we got to know. The bottom line, six months gone and a hard lesson learnt. My purpose of writing this thread is to spread the message more strongly that Readbud is Scam, & it best not to have any hopes with them, whatsoever. If you have already put in time & effort behind them, best thing to do is, simply forget it, no point in wasting any further time with them. Put your time to constructive use by sparing some of your time in raising awareness about these scammers. Share your experiences here & elsewhere so that such scammers do not get to succeed. Cheers
Thanks for the thread. I have only recently started using Readbud so it will be easy to let go. Well much easier at nearer 5 than 50 dollars. Maybe its my naivety in such matters, and I have some concern about asking incase I sound stupid but what do Readbud gain from me wasting 6 months, even as a new member I only get 3 articles at a time on average. Do they get paid when I read an article? or by my mere presense on their website or/and do they sell my email address? I think every spammer has my email address already. Quick thank you to Yahoo for putting 99.99% of it into the spambox.
Hi Hagler, You are indeed at the right stage to let it go & that is the best thing to do. I had a difficult time, as I found about them when I had already reached $37. That made me see the outcome for myself, resulting in another four months of wasted time & effort. Anyway as you asked, readbud gets paid by the number of advertisements they place on their website. If you may have noticed, the advertisements shown to you are based on your interests. Remember, when you joined, you are required to specify your interests. (as the scammer put it - "so that they can serve you interesting articles to read & rate") The whole idea behind this is to find out what you like and gain out of this by serving you ad's of your interest. This substantially increases the chances of you viewing such ad's. Typically, members end up clicking through quite a few ads per session. (In fact, readbud gets shameless quite a few times by popping up messages telling you to click the advertisements.) Depending on demographic factors & the kind of advertisements a user clicks, readbud gets paid handsomely. Here are some very gross calculations. (I could be completely wrong & off by a huge margin) Say an average user clicks just one ad per day, advertisement view rates vary from 0.10c to even as high as $1.00 per ad view. I am assuming readbud has a user base of 15000+ members. Readbud's site shows the number of members logged in, say 12,000 to 15,000 members at any point of time. If no of members logged in at any given time is say 12,000, then the average members logging in per day should be indeed very high. I have no way of estimating the actual user base. Anyway, on a very conservative note, here's what they could be making. 15000 x 0.20c = $3000 per day or $90,000 per month. Isn't that cool money for these scammers to end up with. Mind you, I have taken figures on the lower side, just 1 ad view per member & 0.20c ad rate. I have been scammed twice by readbud & I am going to do everything to help spread the word and increase awareness about these scammers. Cheers
Thanks again for the information, having the urgent need to raise funds and the internet is the only vehicle open to me at the moment I imagine I will learn more on the subject. Closing with another irrelavent point, I was searching more in Googles list on Readbud and I came across one that again stated that it was a scam but such and such a site was great and legit. I went to the site and was greeted by the browser security flashing so I went to Google and again there was a long list on 'Is it a scam' and again I was pointed to the next site etc etc...... My point, such as, is that if there was a legit job on the internet for clicking on scam sites then this time next year I would be a millionaire or maybe thats the start of a good idea for my own scam site ha ha
Check out these sites, you might be able to get started soon. Its not big money, but small bits that do count. I have used all of them and so far know all of these to be fully legit & paying. On most of these sites you can offer/do a variety of services/jobs that you are skilled at. fiverr.com, microworkers.com, 7freelance.com, Another good site for doing online work is mturk.com, this site is from Amazon. Do check mturkforum.com to verify the credentials of a Job Requester. Also if you are not from US, then be aware that you will get paid via Amazon Gift Cheque. If you are keen on writing or editing, freelancewriters.info is worth checking out. All the best in our online earning venture. Feel free to ask me for any furthur info. Cheers
Hi Minitrader, I wanted to thank you for sharing your information about Readbud, It goes to show just because something says you have money in an account on your computer does not always make it so. God Bless you my friend, Ron
Hi Ron, You very correctly put it, its virtual money & readbud makes sure it stays that way. I guess, its part of human nature to get greedy & become blind to the obvious signs of a scamster. Readbud's gameplan is to entice a user in the initial phase of joining. This is done by serving many article initially. This makes a member feel that achieving $50 would take less than 4-5 weeks. After two weeks when a member has reached about $30, that's when articles start dwindling exponentially. But for somebody who has reached more than the halfway mark, now it becomes difficult to give up. After all who wants to give up after putting in so much effort. And the next $20 seems well within reach. So what, all one has to do is read & rate articles. So the member continues in quest of the virtual $50. Little does the readbud member realize, that achieving the next $20 is going to take as much as four months. After wasting a total of five & half months, all one needs to do is wait is one full month to know that Readbud is SCAM. The above is exactly what I went through to discover this Scamster. Hopefully, with this thread, I will be able to save a few from being scammed.
I think if i had a site making $90k a month, then I would be happy to pay my workers for the work...so I think your claim of this site making that type of money is overrated...I do not think I have seen any sites that had 12k-15k people logged in unless it was a super network like aol, or such...so i really doubt they have that many people logged in at a given time...the only people getting rich on ads, are the actual ad networks, google, etc.. i would not be surprised to findout that site you claim scam is barely getting by with ad revenue... afterall, if they were really making $90k/month...why would they not be paying... maybe they are not paying because they are barely getting by themselves.... then again, you really have to think something is wrong if anyone spends 5-6 months trying to reach just a few dollars...something is seriously wrong with this.. If my return is not at least $25 per sale, then go away. I surely am not going to waste 6 months trying to earn $30-50....
Not too sure why they don't pay, Only know that they do NOT pay for sure. Help spread the word, get them de-indexed from google. Here's the link to the thread on our DP forum that shows you how to do that. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=2000387 Please make sure that you tweet this & social bookmark this, let all your friends be aware of this scamster.
I just had 3 $ as of now from Readbud and I guess I did the right thing to check into the forum on time instead of wasting my time... and thanks to all for all the info, like a fool I was addicted to readbud but was definitely wondering hw can they pay. If anyone know any site where from we can legitly earn money by not falling prey to these scammers that will be well appreciated.
Thank you, it is important that people come together and share there story's with us to avoid anyone else getting crapped on.
I have reached $50 and the auditing time they alloted for review. THEY HAVE NOT PAID. I have sent messages about 15 of them already and THEY NEVER REPLIED. I have friends whom I have referred to Readbud and some of them already reached their first $50 and are now complaining too of non-payment and unanswered queries. I am really embarassed. I just sent another message now inquiring about it. I have stopped reading articles for one week now until they pay. Please be warned and pass this message to others. Make a blog about it so we can warn others. Thank you and God bless! ...... if you have any questions about my experience, pls do so. tks again.
Yes, I went through the addiction phase too, feels terrible to lose time & money behind such scammers. I am glad this post was of help to you.
I stopped readbud like 2 months ago and checked readbud an hour ago and I can see all their articles are filled with ads and popups. it's felt like hell. everybody should be aware that this is a scam site long time ago.
I think readbud really does pay, maybe not everybody because they cheat, but I have been paid! Also, check out these readbud payment proofs that other readbud members have submitted after being paid... http://readbudreview.blogspot.com
Big deal, for every 100,000 members one or two random members seem to be paid. Just luck. What about the thousands of people who have been scammed by Readbud and not been paid ? A scammer will always remain a scammer and my strong opinion will always be loud and clear "Stay away from Readbud the SCAMMER" Don't believe me! Try it out for yourself. See whether you will be amongst the lucky 0.001% to get paid a paltry $50 for taking chances and putting in five months of your time. I am certain if you go ahead with Readbud, you will come back here to post your sob story, that's my guarantee.
They are scam, they have deleted my account. They still rank in top 2000's in Alexa.com. I don't know how many people are wasting their time over there.
also the pagerank is 3.what a great news! is there is not any autority just like dmca to ban this.......