Saturday, September 25, 2010

Bad day

So I recently reopened my website CashDuck.com. I had closed it over a year ago because I was losing my shirt, and there were just fewer and fewer offers I could put up for the users since the advertisers were getting really fed up with not getting enough real paying customers through using incentivized offers. I felt like this was the right thing to do financially, because there were a lot of ongoing costs associated with maintaining the website and I couldn't compete with the other sites who were putting up junk offers, scammy things and using offers they weren't supposed to be using. Recently when I checked in on my accounts with the ad agencies, there were a lot more offers and the quality and price of these offers were a lot higher than they were a year ago. So I decided to reopen CashDuck. I really enjoyed running the business and I feel this is an industry I know something about, so why not use it?

Well, today has been a load of suck as far as getting interest in CashDuck going. I tried to put a post on a Disney forum where a lot of CashDuck users used to go - it got deleted and I got permanently banned for spam, despite this being my second post and despite there being a lot of other posts that were similar if not more spammy. Now I can't even see if anyone replied with a question. Then, while reading pfblogs looking for good personal finance blogs to buy advertising on, I find a post by a former CashDuck user complaining that she feels used by the reopening. And how does she know I was reopening? Because I had sent a few of the previously active users an email to let them know I was reopening. Many of these people already have referrals since there are lots of referral links floating around on old webpages, and since there are new users that have not heard of CashDuck I thought they might pick up a few more referrals, or at least come in and collect their earnings for doing nothing more than having referred someone years ago.

So today is just the day of can't do shit right. I didn't expect people to be doing a little jig when they found out it was back, just log in to see what's new. And of course now that every other GPT website is using the ideas I introduced, which four years ago were very new and interesting (like giving feathers in addition to cash, and allowing Disney Dollars as a cashout method) I have to come up with all new exciting features for everyone else to copy. It's great to go into business for yourself, kids, so everyone can steal your ideas or badmouth you. Bad day.