My Personal Experience with The Website Fogs.com

Fogs.com is a content site in which writers submit articles to the site and earn money through Adsense. Ordinarily writing for a site where you only make money in this manner would not interest me, and I had no intention of ever submitting an article to this site. However, on May 31 someone from the site contacted me on another site I write for and asked me to submit an article for a contest they were having. There were money prizes for the top 100 articles on the site. These prizes ranged from $50.00 to $150.00. Since, I needed to write the article for the site I was affiliated with I decided to go ahead and submit the article to Fogs.com like I was instructed.

A week or two later I was notified that my article was entered into the contest. It was then I learned exactly what the contest entailed. It seemed that the entire contest was designed to gain a wider reader audience for the site and hopefully make the site more money because readers would click on ads and Fogs.com would get a share of those ad revenues. This meant that in order to win any prize money you were expected to promote your article and thus bring more readers to Fogs.

Winning articles were not only chosen by the number of views your articles got, but also by the number of Facebook likes, comments, and tweets. Since I make my living writing for clients who pay per article and my income is not dependant on “clicks on ads” I at first decided not to bother trying to promote my article as it would take time away from making a real income. However, as the contest progressed and I saw that it was possible for me to win one of the cash prizes I decided to promote my article and hope for the best.

I posted my article on Facebook, twitter, and even asked writer friends on other content sites to read my article to help me win the prize. A few friends went out of their way to promote my article as well. The night before the contest was to end, I was solidly entrenched for some of the prize money.

I awoke the next morning fully expecting to receive a notice stating I had won. Instead, I found a notice that the powers that extended the contest for another week. I suspected the extension was an effort to give some of their favorite writers whose articles were not doing so well a chance to earn some of the prize money. I felt that extending the contest for another week was grossly unfair to those who had all ready honestly earned the prize money by working hard to promote their articles and now could end up with nothing to show for their efforts, but felt there was little I could do about the situation.

When the contest finally ended, I had placed 56 out of the 100 top articles and was entitled to $50.00 in prize money. The site asked me to send my Paypal information and I did so. When I heard nothing further after a couple of days I again sent the info and ask them to let me know they received it. A week passed before I finally heard from them again. They stated they got the information and had all ready awarded some of the prizes and I would get my prize money soon.

Another week or two passed and I finally got an email stating I would receive my prize money sometime between July 27 and August 3 2012. On August 10, 2012 I still had not received my prize money and wrote them an email demanding that they send it. I still have not received a response.

It has become clear to me that Fogs.com is less than honest in the way they conduct business and treat those that write for them. While I wouldn’t call the side a scam I do feel that they are unethical in haunting other sites and asking writers to write for them, then expecting those writers to work to bring them more readers and then cheating those writers out of the money they worked hard to earn.

If anyone else has had a negative experience with this content site, I would love to hear about it as I am seriously considering writing a rip-off report. Internet writers work hard to put out good copy and we should not allow ourselves to be taken advantage of or cheated out of money we worked hard to earn.