PTC Sites Going The Way Of The Dinosaur?

I know a lot of people don't like PTC (paid to click) sites. For those not familiar with the PTC industry, it's pretty big.

And, contrary to popular belief, there are a lot of people making quite a bit of money with them. I don't mean the folks who sit there and click ads for half a penny a piece. I mean the folks who know how to get thousands of referrals. I know several people who are making in excess of $1000 per month from these sites.

Now, another way people make money from these sites is buying massive amounts of cheap traffic, and using it to build a list. The conversion rates are horrible, as you would guess. I've used them in the past to achieve conversion rates of anywhere between 1% - 3%, depending on the landing page I'm using. However, when you buy 100,000 visitors at a time, a 2% conversion rate equals 2000 subscribers.

You can purchase 100,000 visitors on NeoBux for $550, or roughly $0.00550 per click. If you can convert at 2% and get 2000 leads, you pay around 27.5 cents per lead. That's pretty good. I can also tell you from experience that some of landing pages have achieved conversion rates of a little over 3%. 3000+ leads for $550 ain't too shabby.

A lot of people think that these subscribers are unresponsive and will never buy anything. I've found that to be untrue. In fact, these leads are absolutely awesome if you are in the "make money online" niche, because most of them are looking for a real way to earn a legitimate online income. If you are there to provide them with a real plan and you make yourself available to them and really help them, you WILL gain lifetime customers. I can't tell you how many people I now have on my buyers lists that came from PTC leads.

Another way that I've been able to leverage that industry is by giving away a course that teaches people how to get referrals and earn money the right way with PTC. I include a lot of videos and I really try to reach out and help people. You'd be surprised at how well you can do if you can show people that making an investment in your services is really going to work for them.

Anyway, I haven't used this type of advertising for a few years now, since I've been able to build my list up enough to where I'm able to afford to buy more effective paid traffic. The fact remains, however, that PTC is a viable method for a newbie just starting out in the MMO niche to jump start their list building. I might also mention that this method is one of the ways advocated in one of the best selling products of all time on Warrior Plus.

This morning I logged into Clixsense and was going to fool around with a new landing page I had created and I was shocked to find out that they were going to discontinue PTC advertising from their site starting tomorrow. I had always thought that was the bread and butter of that site, but they are claiming in their announcement that it's not. I actually don't really believe that, and I doubt most of the thousands of their other members do, either. Maybe things have changed since I've been away from it for a while, but I don't think so. PTC is, after all, synonymous with sites like ClixSense and NeoBux.

Here are some excerpts from the ClixSense announcement:

They go on to state:

What's really surprising about that statement is they claim:

Umm... I don't think so! In what world does a person who has hundreds or thousands of people in their downline and who is earning commissions 8 levels deep going to make more money with a single level affiliate program? Certainly not in this world.

However, I don't really blame ClixSense and NeoBux. It's been my understanding that PayPal has pulled the plug on dealing with any and all sites that are even closely related with PTC.

I logged into my NeoBux account this morning and was greeted with another surprise:

So it seems that they have dropped the hammer on the two most popular PTC sites, and from the wording of the NeoBux announcement, the rest will follow.

Do I blame PayPal for doing this? Absolutely not. It's not their fault. Let's face facts. There is tons of fraud related to the PTC industry and I don't blame PP for wanting to distance themselves from it.

However, most of the other PTC sites have simply moved on and have begun accepting Payza, Skrill, STP, Payoneer, and others.

I set up a Payza account and it seems like it won't be big issue at all to conduct payments for advertising using them. I can transfer revenue to my bank account just the same, so I don't see the issue.

NeoBux is going to continue business as usual, and as far as I can tell, so are most of the other top PTC sites.

For the life of me, though, I cannot understand why ClixSense would eliminate it's PTC model. That doesn't make any sense at all to me. Yes, they claim that their "task completion" and "survey" features have overtaken their PTC revenue, but I just can't believe that.

Hey, maybe I'm wrong.

Now, I know a lot of you probably won't be affected by this or even care about it, but I bet there are quite a few of you who are using PTC sites to build your list. I'm not going to drop any names, but I know a couple of pretty successful marketers who use ClixSense and NeoBux regularly for traffic to pad their lists.

I would love to get your read on the situation. Specifically, do you think that this is the beginning of the end of PTC, or do you think that it will go on?

I'd really love to hear some different view points. And please, no one sentence replies like "that traffic is a joke," or "I'd never use that traffic," etc.

Add a little substance to your reply and tell us why or why not you think this is going to hurt the PTC industry as a whole.

Looking forward to your responses