I have to be honest I won’t be shedding any tears for WidgetBucks any time soon. After testing WidgetBucks on a half dozen of my websites I can see why they have decided not to stay in the game.
The cpc payout on these ads was o.k. however they had a serious problem with their advertisers. Some of their advertisers were using WidgetBucks to distribute viruses and malware which would infect the users computer when the ad was clicked on or even just with a page load in most cases. If that wasn’t bad enough the viruses would actually infect the blogs themselves which would in turn cause them to be blacklisted by the major search engines. Nice. Why was this happening you ask and why did WidgetBucks allow this to continue? I have a simple answer. They didn’t give a damn about who advertised on their network as long as they got paid. I had reported the virus issues to WidgetBucks on several occasions in an effort to actually help them determine the cause of the problem and find a resolution. What did WidgetBucks do with the information I provided to them? Nothing.
When they announced that they were shutting down I wasn’t the least bit surprised I have to say.
Do you want to hear more? Here we go. WidgetBucks decided to place a clause in their publisher agreement that stated that any publisher that didn’t accumulate at least $50 in revenue in their account would forfeit that money if terminated from the program for any reason. That includes in this case the fact that WidgetBucks is now defunct and that all publishers were now effectively terminated. Hey that’s a great deal for WidgetBucks! They get to shut the doors and not pay any of their publishers their money that was due to them if their balance was lower than $50. That’s right, if you’re account had less than $50 in it at the time they shut the doors then you get nothing. What’s that you say? I had $49.95 in revenue and I get nothing? That’s right. Kiss it goodbye baby.
Do I smell a class action lawsuit against WidgetBucks parent company in the near future? Maybe. Here’s the bottom line, you have to be careful what affiliate network you’re dealing with. Check out their track record, listen to the reviews of current and former publishers and then if everything looks legit, test them out.
There are still a lot of good affiliate publisher networks out there including Chitika, Kontera, Infolinks (excellent so far) and more. So don’t get discouraged if you run into a bad one here and there. I will be providing you with more insight on these affiliate publisher networks and more in some upcoming posts.
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