What I find even more interesting than the scam itself is that the site designer actually tells the potential buyers that the site is designed as a scam. He’s not even trying to hide the fact!
Here’s how the scam works.
You design a website that claims to show first run movies. You make the site look authentic as possible by stealing movie poster graphic from some other site and link it to a fake ‘youtube’ type graphic.
When the site visitor clicks play, they are sent to a site that conducts surveys with a note that says something like, “Keeping this site up and running is expensive! Please fill out this quick survey before viewing the movie. Thanks!”
The survey company pays the website owner a small amount of money for each completed survey. When the site visitor finishes the survey they are then sent back to the movie site where they get the message, “This movie is no longer available due to copyright violations.”
Slick, huh?
There isn’t a single movie on the site. In fact there isn’t any legitimate content at all.
My favorite part of the auction was from the site description from the seller.
“The main “inconvenience”, as you may know, is that movies are not allowed to be shared for free throughout the internet. The only way I’ve found to bypass that is to never actually host, stream or provide links to any of the copyrighted material. After the user completes and offer, they will be redirected to an error message saying that the selected material is protected by copyright law.”
Um, yeah. That’s not inconvenient, that’s the law.
He then gave some great advise and said, “never host, stream or provide links to any of the copyrighted material.”
“You might think that this will ruin your website’s reputation…”
Reputation?! Hello, it’s a scam and you’re talking about your site reputation?
“…but here’s the deal: to the new visitors, although they may have their doubts, everything looks legit…”
Seriously? Why does Flippa allow this kind of crap to be auctioned through their site?
“Obviously after a number of failed attempts, that visitor may not come back to your site again, but you would have already made off him more than from the average returning visitor on a usual site like a blog or forum.”
Nice. And this site actually sold for almost $3,000.
I don’t have any data showing that this scam actually brings in any money.
My guess is that you just can’t make much by having people fill out worthless surveys.
The real person getting scammed in this deal is the sucker who ponied up the $3000 to buy this site.
Apparently there is an entire industry out there that consists of people buying and flipping blogs and websites. Who knew?
When I started SuperBlogTime, I thought it would be a fun experiment to see if it was possible to make money through blogging. My understanding was that people who made money blogging did it through ads or maybe affiliate marketing and more rarely through product sales. Ok, maybe some people are making money that way but check this out.
A little while back I was getting the urge to update the look of SBT. It was right before WordPress upgraded to 3.0 and there were ads all over the interwebz about an imminent price increase on the Thesis WordPress Theme from DIYthemes.com.
I had heard about the Thesis theme from a few sites and it seemed like a really great product. The price increase was to be from $169 to $299 and the ads did a really good job of creating a sense of uber urgency. Upgrade NOW before the price goes up! Hurry!Last Chance!
I almost took the bait and bought it. Almost.
But then I got really busy (as you can tell from the lack of posts here at SBT) and just didn’t really get to it. So today I went back to the website and lo and behold the price is … $169.
Huh. No price increase? But what about the urgency! I was told that it was going to happen immediately!
As they say in Jurassic Park – “Clever girl”.
Now, I’m not saying that the price won’t go up eventually but it certainly hasn’t happened yet. I can’t help but wonder how many new users they were able to get from that ad campaign. I bet they made a lot of money!
Anyway, I’m still looking for a new theme. Any advice out there? Should I suck it up and buy Thesis or is there a less expensive alternative?
2 comments - What do you think? Posted by
Curtis -
September 6, 2010 at 10:52 am
I’ve often wondered if bloggers were required to get a business license if they were making income from their site. Apparently if you live in Philidelphia that question has been answered.
The city required at least on blogger to pay the business fee even though she only made $50 over the “last few years”.
Got a blog that makes no money? The city wants $300, thank you very much.
by Valerie Rubinsky
Published: August 18, 2010
[ death and taxes ]
For the past three years, Marilyn Bess has operated MS Philly Organic, a small, low-traffic blog that features occasional posts about green living, out of her Manayunk home. Between her blog and infrequent contributions to ehow.com, over the last few years she says she’s made about $50. To Bess, her website is a hobby. To the city of Philadelphia, it’s a potential moneymaker, and the city wants its cut.
In May, the city sent Bess a letter demanding that she pay $300, the price of a business privilege license.
“The real kick in the pants is that I don’t even have a full-time job, so for the city to tell me to pony up $300 for a business privilege license, pay wage tax, business privilege tax, net profits tax on a handful of money is outrageous,” Bess says.
It would be one thing if Bess’ website were, well, an actual business, or if the amount of money the city wanted didn’t outpace her earnings six-fold. Sure, the city has its rules; and yes, cash-strapped cities can’t very well ignore potential sources of income. But at the same time, there must be some room for discretion and common sense.
When Bess pressed her case to officials with the city’s now-closed tax amnesty program, she says, “I was told to hire an accountant.”
She’s not alone. After dutifully reporting even the smallest profits on their tax filings this year, a number — though no one knows exactly what that number is — of Philadelphia bloggers were dispatched letters informing them that they owe $300 for a privilege license, plus taxes on any profits they made.
Even if, as with Sean Barry, that profit is $11 over two years.
Barry’s music-oriented blog, Circle of Fits, is hosted on Blogspot; as of this writing, its home page has two ads on it, but because he gets only a fraction of the already low ad revenue — the rest goes to Blogspot — it’s far from lucrative.
“Personally, I don’t think Circle of Fits is a business,” says Barry. “It might be someday if I start selling coffee mugs, key chains or locks of my hair to my fans. I don’t think blogs should be taxed unless they are making an immense profit.”
The city disagrees. Even though small-time bloggers aren’t exactly raking in the dough, the city requires privilege licenses for any business engaged in any “activity for profit,” says tax attorney Michael Mandale of Center City law firm Mandale Kaufmann. This applies “whether or not they earned a profit during the preceding year,” he adds.
So even if your blog collects a handful of hits a day, as long as there’s the potential for it to be lucrative — and, as Mandale points out, most hosting sites set aside space for bloggers to sell advertising — the city thinks you should cut it a check. According to Andrea Mannino of the Philadelphia Department of Revenue, in fact, simply choosing the option to make money from ads — regardless of how much or little money is actually generated — qualifies a blog as a business. The same rules apply to freelance writers. As former City Paper news editor Doron Taussig once lamented [Slant, "Taxed Out," April 28, 2005], the city considers freelancers — which both Bess and Barry are, in addition to their blog work — “businesses,” and requires them to pay for a license and pay taxes on their profits, on top of their state and federal taxes.
Mannino says the city doesn’t keep track of how many bloggers and small-website owners are affected. But bloggers aren’t the only ones upset with the city’s tax structure. In June, City Council members Bill Green and Maria Quiñones-Sánchez unveiled a proposal to reform the city’s business privilege tax in an effort to make Philly a more attractive place for small businesses. If their bill passes, bloggers will still have to get a privilege license if their sites are designed to make money, but they would no longer have to pay taxes on their first $100,000 in profit. (If bloggers don’t want to fork over $300 for a lifetime license, Green suggests they take the city’s $50-a-year plan.)
Their bill will be officially introduced in September. “There’s a lot of support and interest in this idea,” Green says.
Perhaps, but it doesn’t change the fact that the city wants some people to pay more in taxes than they earn. “I definitely don’t want to see people paying more in taxes and fees than what [we] earn,” says Bess. “But I do think the city needs to establish a minimal amount of money that they won’t tax, whether you’re a bike messenger, microblogger or a freelance typist.”
It’s been a few months since I started SBT, and I’ve found that I needed to brush up on my grammar. I’ve never been a super eloquent writer and producing copy for the public on a blog can be stressful if you’re unsure of your writing skills.
One of the biggest issues I have been struggling with is that I had forgotten how to properly write a title.
Remember when you were little and you learned which words were supposed to be capitalized and which were not? I remember learning the rule but I couldn’t remember the details. What about words like “you” and “are” or “could”. No clue.
So I went searching for an answer and here’s what I found.
The Rule(sort of…)
When writing a title “Capitalize all words in titles of publications and documents, except a, an, the, at, by, for, in, of, on, to, up, and, as, but, it, or, and nor.” This comes from the U.S. Government style guide via writers.com.
Now of course, that is not a hard and fast rule but it’s the style guide I’m going to use for SBT. It’s short and sweet and if challenged, I can say that it’s from the government so it can’t possibly be wrong
Thoughts? What style do you use for the title of your posts?
2 comments - What do you think? Posted by
Curtis -
July 24, 2010 at 11:02 am
For the longest time I’ve been trying to find a plug-in that would allow readers to receive notification of a new comment on a post.
Today I found it! Finally! I just installed the plug-in “Subscribe to Comments” by Mark Jaquith (don’t ask why it took so long for me to find – clearly it should have been pretty obvious since the name of the plug-in actually describes the functionality I was looking for).
So what does it do you ask? I does exactly what the name implies. You leave a comment here, check the “notify me…” box under the captcha code and when the next person comments below you, an e-mail will be sent alerting you of the fact.
Hopefully the next comment will be a reply to you from me where I tell you that your comment was witty and charming and I thank you for reading SuperBlogTime!
Personally, I really like to find out when someone has replied to a comment that I wrote. The problem I have is remembering where I left comments and going back to them later. With e-mail notification, I don’t have to worry about it; I receive an e-mail everytime someone leaves a comment. And now, SBT has the same system in place! Sweet.
As I was looking for the plug-in, I came across a great post by Ms. Ileane about keeping the conversation going in your comment section. One of the people commented saying that although subscribing to comments by e-mail is a good idea, your in-box can quickly fill up if you do it too often or on a very popular site.
That can be a problem, but one thing I might do to get around it is to create a new e-mail address just for comments. That’s a really good idea if I do say so myself. Genius, really.
What do you think? Do you like e-mail notifications? Is it too much for your in-box or does it keep the conversation going as Ms. Ileane said.
There’s a new way to monetize your blog on the interwebz!
The service is currently in Beta, but soon you will be able to make an extra buck or two using a new service I stumbled across while surfing the interwebz called Flattr. According to Wikipedia, it was created by the co-founder of the super infamous Pirate Bay, Peter Sunde.
What is Flattr, you ask? Well…
The basic idea is that members pay a certain amount of money to the site each month – sort of like a donation – which ranges from 2 – 100 Euros (the site is very Euro-centric right now because it was created in Sweden). You can use PayPal or a credit card to put money into your account.
During the month, you check out other members sites and vote for your favorite content. Anything you can imagine can be voted on: software, blog posts, images, videos, anything.
At the end of the month, your membership fee is divided into a number of shares equal to the votes you cast. Then the magic happens! Each site you voted for gets one share of the amount you “donated” at the beginning of the month.
If you make something super cool on your site and you get a lot of votes, you could make some serious money. Last month, someone was paid out about 100 euros (about $125).
The site is basically a mix between Kiva, Paypal and Kickstarter.
There is a really great video of how it works.
So, for example, if the monthly membership fee is $5 and the member clicks on 40 sites during the month then each site would get $0.125.
Lets say that 100 members see your site that month and “like” just one of your articles. Your total for the month would be $12.50.
What if 1000 members voted for on of your articles. Your total increases to $125.00. That’s nothing to sneeze at.
BETA Code Give Away
The BETA version of Flattr was opened to the public on February 10, 2010. Initially 200 invites were sent out. A lot more have since gone out so the site is getting populated nicely. Again, it’s very euro-centric right now so there are a lot of foreign language sites. It won’t be that way long once the site is officially launched though.
I have oneextra Beta Key that I’m going to give away to the person who leaves the most convincing comment about why they are interested.
Of course, please only take it if you are seriously going to use Flattr!
I do it all the time. I come up with a great idea for a blog post and I start writing about it at my desk. After a few sentences something distracts me and I stop writing.
Sometime I make it back and the post gets finished and published. More often than I would like, however, it gets stuck in my “saved drafts” folder and never sees the light of day.
Am I alone?
How many posts do you have that are partially written and for whatever reason you never make it back to complete them?
Right now I have notes jotted down for at least ten different articles that I want to write. They are good ideas to be sure but for some reason I just can’t complete them!
Leave a comment and let me know how many you have on the drawing board. Do you plan on coming back and finishing them or are you going to just ignore them.
Seriously, leave a comment and let me know. Let’s talk about it!
Upcoming!
I’m working on an article about a new service I found that will help everyone make some cash from their blogs. Stay tuned!
I even have a beta key to give away!
5 comments - What do you think? Posted by
Curtis -
July 2, 2010 at 6:14 pm
I’ve been checking out Flippa.com again this week and found quite the interesting auction.
