So I decided to create this post just because I want to share what I went through with shareapic.net
I signed up around april 2008 on the site and went through all the last steps where they give you undesired spam-type offers and skipped them (I just want an account to supposedly make money, not to spend it!)
Well, I uploaded thousands of pictures into about a hundred galleries and EVERY one of them was approved. But as time passed I saw few clicks on my pictures so I went more proactive and began sharing more pictures on sites. I even created this blog about the most visited pictures I found on shareapic.net's galleries as you can see. I also included my galleries for the sake of making some extra cents. (Yes, I'm taking about cents, not bucks, it's that slow)
However, the experience for average Joe web user when entering my galleries must have been far from pleasant. Every image is displayed in a new page, with lots of ads and, oh boy, it's as slow as my grandma. They surely improved the response time but it seems still slow (should be the ads) .
BUT here's the thing that killed my dreams. After almost a year I finally crossed the to the $20 USD mark in my account balance to get my payment. Once you request it, you have to wait 30 days so they check you're not trying to foolish them by clicking on your own pics or automating clicks nor any other type of illegal traffic. It's comprehensible. BUT on day 29 of waiting for payment my ACCOUNT was DELETED without explanations. I asked for a reason, but received none. Not a single "sorry you fool". It was really frustrating. I spent hours uploading and sharing images and watching my "account balance" slowly grew as the months passed.
So I'm still guessing what the reason was. I think it may have been that I uploaded some questionable pictures of girls in the auto show. There were no nudes, no porn of course. You can go and check this blog as the thumbnails still remain active and see what I mean by questionable.
HOWEVER as I said before, every gallery of images was approved. Yes, it was approved by an administrator (it's the usual procedure) so if there were really questionable images, they should have warned me or deleted the gallery as they did once with an image I uploaded as part of a bulk upload (using the SAPuploader.exe tool they provide) and I didn't realized an under cleavage of Keeley Hazell was seen there.
So, that's basically the story. I GOT NO PAYMENT, MY ACCOUNT AND IMAGES DELETED AND NO SINGLE EXPLANATION OF WHY THEY KICKED ME OUT.
If you see it, it's the perfect scam because:
- They don't need to hire people to collect, upload, organize, name and distribute the images. YOU are working for free
- Every image you share creates a link to their website which increases the popularity of it so they can get better ranking and thus better income from the ads they display on the website
- They can argue any type of violation to the TOS without proving it and they will not give you an explanation when the time to pay comes. It's just not profitable to pay you since you are supposed to work for free to make them earn more money
- They pay a few users so they say it's legit and they encourage you to visit the praises section in the forum where those users post the ammounts they are receiving. I'm sure there must be some guys with paychecks (the admins of course), but hey!, only a few bunch of users post their praises. There are only 512 posts in the praises section (including replies) but MOST users, and I mean, hundreds of thousands (they claim how many users they have on the homepage, over 272k at this moment) are not posting any praises! If it were such a great site, we will see more praises, lots more. Even hear from friends about it
And I have not discussed about pro-rated payments which MANY users complain about. They don't prove you are bringing useless traffic, that is, asian traffic. They just slash your payment and, if you're lucky, get a few words saying you bring useless traffic.
Don't just take my word, do your research, Google shareapic.net scam before signing up and spending your time and energy and finding out months later you have been scammed... as I was.
Share your comments and warnings please (Jordan, hmm hmm, don't...)
