A month ago, I came across NeoBux. Read up on it a little and checked out some commentaries about it. In the end, I decided to join and give it a try. Here are my experiences. Uncommunicated costs, unclear advertising, tricky adverts, very interesting coincidences. Read on to find out if I think NeoBux is a scam or not.
I want to start by clarifying the things I didn’t know when I joined NeoBux. This info was not readily available during the research I did about NeoBux nor on their infopages. Then I will describe what I did, my experiences and observations and then my final verdict.
The stuff you don’t know when you sign up with NeoBux
Earn 0,02 USD per viewed advertisement
A catchy way to get customers. Here are the pre-conditions for earning two cents per click. You need a golden membership, which you can only get after 15 days, two instances of renting folks to click on adds for you, and after paying 90 USD for a gold membership… Until these conditions are met, you only get 1 cent per click.
Another bit of information you are not told is that you are only allowed to click on 4 adds per day. At least as a ordinary member. Sometimes NeoBux allows you to click on some 0,5 cent adverts but I saw no pattern to when that option was available.
Earn 0,01 USD on rented referral’s clicks
This is the largest innovation and the coolest aspect of NeoBux. You can ”rent” other members, and thus get a revenue from their clicks. However, until you get a golden membership or above, you only earn 0,005 USD (that is half a cent) per referral click. For a fee of 8 cents, you can replace a referral that is not clicking enough.
Earn money from your buddies who you recruited
Although NeoBux provides their users with a nice interactive banner to help them recruit, any clicks from recruited referrals will only be available for the recruiter after 30 days membership.
The banners
NeoBux makes easily available recruiting banners for their users. Here is mine:
At the publishing of this article, the banner said that I’ve maid 20,07 USD already. Sure, but how much did I invest? Well I rented 70 referrals for a month and recycled a bunch of times adding up to an overall cost of about 20 USD. And available for me to withdraw at this moment is 14 USD. So, think about it when you see people who’s banners say they earned 15,000 USD and stuff.
Getting paid
Another pice of info you don’t get until it is time for NeoBux to send you your money is that a fee of $0.30 gets taken off as a fee from the money that you have earned. That is more than seven days worth of clicking on adds, if you don’t have golden membership and no recruits clicking for you. What about that… A weeks work for transfer costs…
What happened to me
So here are the things I did. I signed up. Transferred 15 USD into my NeoBux account. Purchased 50 referrals for 12.x USD (first two rentings are at a reduced rate). Enabled the AutoPay function for the first couple of days, then I stopped as NeoBux was automatically deducting the money I had transferred into my account. About 7-10 days later I transferred another 5 USD (I think) and rented another 20 referrals. Over all for the past month, I think I recycled referrals about 20 times. I decided not to become a golden member after 15 days because I didn’t feel like paying 90 USD for a golden membership.
My observations and reflections
4 adverts per day
What a joke! Add it up, and 4 cents won’t even cover your electricity bill. I don’t know what the click limit is for golden members and above, but unless you are able to spend hours clicking on adverts I doubt any money you make from your own advert views will even cover your electricity bill.
The advertisements
Be prepared that these are ”interactive and highly annoying” advertisements. You get pop-up windows and dialog boxes once you try to close the window with the advert. They are the kind of adverts where I refused to click on the OK or Cancel button, fearing that they have hidden functionality linked to some maleware. The only way I closed them was using the X in the dialog box itself.
Rented referrals
There is a strange detachment from reality here, as you do not know if the people you recruit exist, you can’t interact with them or anything. You only see statistics over how many times they have clicked in a manner that has generated money for you. You also don’t know if you yourself have become someone’s referral for someone else…
There are also certain things in how this works that make me suspicious. First of all, how come some users can click up to 10-14 times per day? I guess they are super users or something. And how come certain users only click once a day? I mean if I log into my account on NeoBux, I will click all the 4 times that are available to me. And if they do click 4 times why aren’t these clicks available to me?
Conspiracy theory
Like I said, after 15 days I decided not to become a golden member. And what I noticed was that the rate at which my rented referrals were clicking started to plummet. I had done nothing, they just stopped clicking. I went from an average of over 2 clicks per day to less than one click per day per referral towards the end of the month. I may have done something wrong, others may have other experiences, either way I made some screenshots of my account at different times after I noticed this trend. You can make up your own mind whether this is a coincidence or not.
This picture shows that I do indeed have an account at NeoBux that I started on the 30th of May 2009.
On this picture, screenshot taken on the 23rd of June, it is clearly visible that there was a deep plummet on the 16th of June. This is 16 days after I started my account and 1 day after I decided not to become a golden member and pay 90 USD.
On this screenshot from June 26, you can see the steady decline of referral clicks and by the 25th I less clicks then the number of referrals.
In the next three days there is a marginal pickup but it is still not even near what it was during the first 15 days.
The final picture shows what it looked like once my last day for the 50 first referrals expired
Conclusion
Is NeoBux a scam? To be honest I don’t know. Parts of it make me think so, other parts not. They use very dodgy advertising mechanisms where a lot of the fine print is only available to you when you fulfill certain criteria. The way my rented referral’s average clicks plummeted once I decided not to become a golden member after 15 days makes me wonder whether the rented people are actually people or just mathematic calculations that make it seem like I will be making money but in the end fall short of a profit.
On the other hand, they do pay out any money you’ve ”earned” and they are clear at what intervals they will be paying you any money. And ultimately that is the key element which points to the fact that it is not a scam – you can get your money back or any profit you earned.
Also, it is worth mentioning, that I didn’t become a golden member and I didn’t have any recruited referrals. My experiences may have been different if I had. And of course, there is always a risk that I’m not as savvy as some and just couldn’t figure out how to make money with NeoBux.
Anyway, if you wanna give them a try yourself here is a link to a calculation tool for NeoBux. It does not calculate things like recycling costs but it works to give you a brief idea. And if you liked this evaluation, here is my banner, use me as a referral 😉