Hi, I had registred on shoppingads.com in october, as i recived an invitation in the beta test. For those of you who don't know, ShoppingAds has the same owner as AuctionAds and Text-Link-Ads. Well, i was running both ShoppingAds and WidgetBucks on the same site that time(20october-15november)... With widgetbucks i earned 1800$, with ShoppingAds i earned 600$... ShoppingAds sent me my first payment of 230$( earnings till october 27)... as i recived my payment, i thaught they're real, as i wasn't sure i'll get paid by WB. After that, they stopped showing ads on my site...they said they are migrating to a US-only policy... i understood, even that i had great RPC(it was allways rising, never dropping) on WidgetBucks, as it seems my ads converted very well, and i removed their ads. I waited to get paid on 1st of december...and SURPRISE! no payment recived... I mailed them few times, and few days ago got the following message: Wtf? i had more than 350$ left in my account... I mailed them again, and told them it has to be a mistake...i even sent them a screenshot of my account(my account still showed 607.33$ total earnings)... Few days later, i get again, wtf? I mail them again, and i get: After that my earnings dropped to 550$ in my account.. but still, 300$ should be paid to me... Wtf? how is that possible? What's your opinion guys? My verdict: AuctionAds/ShoppingAds => SCAM
I got this in my mailbox from pay-ads a few days ago: cleary written by an amature.. //edit woops i must be drunk. i misread shopping-ads for pay-ads. Silly me.
Well wether they are trying to cheat you, or just doesn't know what they're doing this doesn't hold up. But from my point of view it looks like they don't want to pay you, since you no longer run thier ads. Usually they pay you so you keep running thier ads. But thanks for the warning anyway
I think they are trying to fool you, and for some days try to display there ads once again and see the outcome. Shopping ads sucks
I'd throw one of their ads back up and complain again, see where it gets you. If that doesn't work your choices are alot slimmer.
arkserver, I got that email too. I registered with them months ago, but never used them. That was my 1st email I got from them, and yes, very unprofessional and I think it shows their site is not doing well and getting desperate it seems. I know most of the websites that advertise on their network are HYIP/AUTOSURF/GET PAID TO/PAID TO READ EMAILS sites. I was going to advertise a site of mine, but they wanted like $3.00 per day and I didn't feel it was worth it since the site seemed fishy. They let publishers post their ads in their signature on selected forums which is a nice feature. Have you made any money with them?
So have I - In fact every payment has been on time. Usually when I hear about someone who didnt get paid, usually its because they didnt do something they were suppose to do, like submit their tax information. Thats why I asked if he found out why his payment was delayed.
A few days ago I got the same email "You have not yet passed the minimum of $50 that is required" when I contacted AuctionAds about not receiving payment. The same scammers run both programs. I checked my stats and found they have zeroed out previous months' earnings.
I started with AuctionAds back in April I think. They were ok, but things changed quite a bit when Media Whiz took them over. Now I find out today that they dropped the AuctionAds name (Branding? Who needs 9 months of branding???) and is calling themselves ShoppingAds. I just got another payment from them. AA had paid every month, but the new company had a $50 minimum to get paid. Since my earnings were in the toilet since they took over, I had to wait about 3 months to get paid again. Now I'm waiting for someone else to offer an advertising network like the old AA so I can join it. When my traffic dropped I tried contacting them and the one web designer in charge of support for AA was pretty much impossible to get ahold of and had a real attitude problem. I even tried contacting Patrick the owner and MediaWhiz management and got nowhere. So, try them if you want because you may make some good money with them, but don't spend a lot of time and energy to deploy their adcode to your network or sites without being prepared to pull it all again if things don't work out. I went through this with Chitika and now AA and it's a REAL PAIN...! Better to work with companies that treat you with respect like the partner that you are, than those that treat you like dirt. But then again, maybe it's just me.....?
Well said Christian. In the old days I was more trusting and would put a lot of effort into tailoring pages around a network's ad code. But after getting crapped on by YPN I went to work recoding all my pages (lots of them) so that I can swap out one network for another with just a couple edits to some php include files. I really advise that for everybody now days due to all the incompetent and scamming ad networks.
I just cant believe they are scammers. To me they just dont know how to get it right. AA is merged with SA now, lol. More confusion on the way
I've normally had payments on time by Auctionads but had *nothing* for Jan. Now the earnings are down 90% from december & they've merged the whole system with Shoppingads. Not happy at all, I'll be sending my 250,000+ uniques elsewhere.
Yesterday I posted that AuctionAds has now become ShoppingAds! and from the threads here about Auctionads, it's really no wonder that Shoppingads is doing the exact same things. For some it seems to work wonders, for some it's a wonder it works at all. I have one page that pulls ads on target each and every time, another page I've yet to see pull the proper ads. *boggle* In another thread: CJ is totally worthless you'll see that the previous owner seemingly has no reporting issues with 6 digit figures in their CJ account, yet someplace between CJ and us the reports have gone FUBAR. I was really hoping that the change from AA to SA would be a change for the better, but this thread has me questioning that. *sigh* Q
they have always paid me but after puting there ads back on my site they got to go. i had 17k impressions, 70 clicks on there shoppingads for 50 cent haha see ya shoppingads.
If you like the idea of auctionads/shoppingads, but not the service then check out my php script that is the same as auctionads but you keep 100% of the profit. http://www.erikkarey.com/introducing-phpbayads.html