Being a Factoidz Shill
They saw me coming.
I heard about Factoidz from Poleboy who seemed to be on every writing site I visited. He was supported by Ultastir Small. I went to the site, looked around, joined, and posted a reworked piece that I’d published on Xomba about a year before. It was accepted and the coin started to accumulate.
Hey.
I made 5c in a few minutes, and had $1.00 by sundown. Hmmm. I posted a few pieces I’d been working on and they were accepted. By the end of the day I had $2.10, which is more than I get in a month of Xomba.
Double Hey.
By the next day I had $3.80 and was posting everything I had in my ‘pending’ file, pulling things off other sites, upgrading them, and posting to Factoidz.
By the end of the month I had $22.00. Which is more than most people make on Triond in Three months.
I ran from site to site lauding Factoidz as if I had been hired to do so. There wasn’t a writing site, message board, forum, email that didn’t sing the praises of this great site.
The next month I was raised to Staff Writer and had two hundred articles all churning out hits and comments and was raised to ‘Expert’ in various fields. My next check was for $42.00 and I figured, this is it.
It was.
My revenue began to plunge though my hits were up. Articles which had been as controversal as whether to use nutmet or cinnamon in a recipe were attacked by a slurry of other writers as if I’d suggested cooking and eating a dog.
Thinking these people were crazy I responded, then logged off.
That evening, when I went to post I found I had been dropped to ‘Writer’ and my work had to be moderated. When I complained to the ‘dead letter office’ (what I called the ‘moderators’) I was dropped to Member.
There was nothing I could do about it. My work was up, I couldn’t take it down, I received zero revenue.
ZERO.
3,456 Hits.
0 Revenue.
What hurt me more than my being ripped off, was that during the two months of my Factoidz high I had been pimping the site to all and sundry. I had caused dozens of people to join. Dozens.
When I complained on other sites, Madcow, who had attacked my Cinammon vs Nutmeg recipe popped up attacking, and Poleboy and Ultastir denigrating my writing claiming my being dropped to Member was my own fault.
Over the next months people I had solicited for Factoidz began to contact me; the usual was…”I have not been paid for….” followed by; “I had 59c at 10 am but by 3 pm it was 47c”, followed by “I have 1000 hits on my article and 0 revenue”, and some were a bit more precise; “If you *&^&* hadn’t dragged me into &##$^
Factoidz I’d not…”
I had been a Shill. The Con Man’s second, who is sent into the crowd to rope in other suckers. Whether I was the ‘winner’ at 3 Card Monte, or the holder of that big Teddy Bear at the Fair, or the one bringing flesh blood to Bernie Madoff’s table, I was the bait, the lure, the dupe.
I went to scamchecker.com and reported the fraud as well as to other sites. Lots of people, (besides those who were lured in by my recommendation), were writing about their experiences.
I realised, unlike Poleboy and Ultastir, I was just a part-time shill, temporary, served my purpose, where they were permanently on the payroll.
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October 8th, 2010 at 1:49 pm
Yep, Factoidz no longer pays per Thousand views, Hundred views, etc… i think they now pay for SEO ranking of your articles?… some of my articles get over 10k visits a month there and i make 9 Cents lol…. because they are ranked “Low”….
I have 18 Articles in Factoidz at the moment, i’ve been hearing allot that people suddenly get dropped to member status, i really couldn’t tell, i stopped writing for them once they adopted this new method, so now im here in Triond.
October 8th, 2010 at 1:49 pm
Thanks for the eye-opener.
There is nothing worse than being used, unless it is being used for talking friends into a ‘good deal’ that turns out to be a fraud.
October 8th, 2010 at 3:36 pm
The reason Factoidz appears to have changed its policy is due to the fact there aren’t as many people to rip off today as there was six months ago. Doing a Google of Factoidz + ripoff or Factoidz+fraud turns up a LOT of dissatisfied ex users. There are still shills, a couple of them are here on Triond, but they aren’t as vocal as they used to be
Like any Ponzi, those who got in ‘early’, for example Dec 09 made the bag until like April 10 when the Ponzi began to crash.
October 8th, 2010 at 4:28 pm
You got me reading Factoidz. Then they screwed with you and I stopped. Let’s see how long they last without fresh content.
October 8th, 2010 at 10:50 pm
They get new fools but the problem is now they are paying so much less that the shills have little work.
October 9th, 2010 at 12:10 am
Good Work
October 10th, 2010 at 1:11 pm
I hope it helps
October 18th, 2010 at 12:15 am
i am a member of triond and factoidz, well, i checked out the analytics on compete.com, and guess what i found? until last month or so, factoidz.com was really getting more and more views, but this month, their views seem to be falling down.
I remember when i was new, just three or four articles published, i submitted a new article, with many spelling mistakes and grammatical errors which i did not check properly, and the article was rejected, after trying to fix it up, i sent it back again, but again it was rejected with the message,”your article has errors. Don’t submit again without fixing the errors or else your account will be deleted.”, so that was a warning,
my question the writer of this article is, Did you get a warning before being demoted?
October 18th, 2010 at 7:49 am
No. There is no warning. You log in one day and you don’t even notice you’ve been dropped from Staff to Writer or Writer to Member. They’re Factoidz, they don’t have to tell the public anything.