Webupon

If you tweet a lot the thought of making some spare change in return for allowing an advertisement to be tweeted from your Twitter account once every 5, 10, 20, 30, tweets sounds like an OK proposition.  I tweet a lot so I thought I would give it a try.  I should have done a Google search to see what people were saying about it, but like everyone else I got lazy and accepted the “testimonials”.

Image via CrunchBase

Be-A-Magpie

Be-A-Magpie works like this; you sign up and log in using your Twitter name and password.  You have a choice of how often you would like to tweet for advertisers based on how many tweets you have posted. For example you can choose to have one Magpie ad posted for every 5 of your own personal tweets.  Or less often.

You can also choose to “approve” ads.  But one of the things they don’t tell you upfront is that advertisers can also approve or exclude you based on what (the content of your tweets) and how often you tweet.

Then as people read your tweets and see the ads, for some ads you will be paid per click, for others you will be paid for leads where people actually sign up, and for the rest you get paid if they buy something.

Once your account reaches $50.00, you are “eligible” for payment.  Whatever that means.  This should have set off the alarms in my head but it didn’t.

So I signed up, and forgot about it.

Look Mom, I’m an Advertising Medium

From time to time I would notice an ad posted to my timeline on Twitter, and wondered if I would make any money at it.  I logged in and went to my account where it shows just what ads had been clicked and how much I received for each one.

Woo-hoo!!!  Hey, it’s only thirty to fifty cents at a time, but it adds up.  At this rate I can expect a payout two or three times a year.  Wonder what will happen as I get more followers?

You Are Hereby Suspended for Fraud

For the last month the number of people following me on Twitter doubled, and keeps growing.  The number of people I converse with has grown.  And as a writer my body of work has grown, so more tweets for that too.  Payday should be just around the corner.

Then I get an email telling me my account has been suspended for fraud.  Well !?/#$-you too!  What the heck is this about?

My crime – “…by aggregating one or more RSS feeds.” I violated TOS (terms of service).

Excuse me?  WTF does that mean?

It means that Triond posts a tweet whenever I publish something.  It means that I re-tweet my published work to give people a chance to read it.  It means my work appears on the web, on several different sites on the web.  It means I use hash-tags.  It means I share websites I find interesting with my friends. It means I use Twitter apps such as TweetDeck.

It means I use what Twitter offers.

Apparently this makes me guilty of fraud. Which means they will keep any money I had earned. 

Surprise, surprise, surprise.

Ways to Violate BAMs TOS

In looking at their Terms of Service, it would appear that they can terminate you for any of the following reasons -

• Not being at least 18 – (I’m guessing that once you reach the payout amount they will demand a credit card to prove age or no money)
• Posting anything that could be considered discriminatory against race, sexual preference, location, gender, religion, age, or disability
• Post anything that could be construed as glorifying violence (perhaps like the game Mafia Wars?)
• Post anything that could be deemed pornographic
• Post anything that could be deemed an infringement of either copyright or trademark
• Post anything that “compromises” any Advertisers image (my isn’t that subjective)
• If you as a Twitterer are subject to a turnover or VAT tax you must provide your taxpayer ID number on the appropriate forms (yes that could mean your social security number)
• If you misuse Be-A-Magpie. (more subjectivity)
• Aggregating one or more RSS feeds in your tweets.
• Automating tweets with the intent to have a high amount of delivered ads.
• And again, just in case you didn’t get it the first time, any form of misuse, whatever they determine that to be.

Gosh, I hope Bernie Madoff has room in his cell, I might be joining him.

Just to be Fair

Just to be fair, they will of course suspend my account and money for 4 weeks while they “…watch your account for compliance with terms and conditions”.

I guess they thought that up to go along with another interesting little piece of fine print that says that even if you manage to achieve a payday, they can hang onto the money for TEN MORE WEEKS before paying you. For no reason at all.  I wonder what they could possibly need ten whole weeks for?  It couldn’t be to have time to look for excuses to keep the money?  Nah…

Google is Your Friend

It’s my fault really.  I should have used Google to see what kind of reputation this company had.

WHO-IS data for Be-A-Magpie can be found here.  Have a look, it’s interesting.

Even more telling are the angry reviews to be found at various forums.  One of which I found interesting because the CEO, Jan Schulz-Hofen, found it necessary to post a reply in this forum in response to their disgruntled meanderings.  The reason they needed to keep the money was -

• Such accounts rarely made any money, and even if they did the clicks were bogus. (Then doesn’t that mean that there wouldn’t be any money in the account?  And apparently the sales were bogus too?  Going to give those customers their money back?)
• Those types of accounts have mainly dead followers or leads (I’d say that’s a problem common to the advertising industry, and doesn’t involve a refund in any other medium so why this one?)
• Reimburse the advertiser. (you know, in my neck of the woods when an advertiser gets a customer, and gets the money back that he paid for that customer, it’s called a kickback)

Is Be-A-Magpie a Scam?

Well, if you are a Twitterer who only tweets politically correct posts that would offend absolutely no one on earth, and never use any kind of language that anyone anywhere would find objectionable, and never forward a link you found interesting to a friend, and only post from your actual page on Twitter itself…No.

But then again, what do you care since you’re obviously posting so little that you’ll never be paid anyway.

So no, technically, legally, it’s not a scam.  But my dad always said “…if it looks like a cow, moos like a cow, and gives milk like a cow…”

Quite frankly I don’t see how they can convince someone that this business model would work?  Ads need to be published where they will be seen by a lot of people.  No one is following Aunt Sally telling her neighbor about her bunions.  You need the tens of thousands of potential customers following John Chow waiting for him to tweet a link to his latest blog post, or money-making idea.

I thought the days of goons standing at the time-clock on payday telling you to “…hand it over…it’s a privilege to work here don’t ya know…” were over.

My advice to you is…don’t be a magpie.  But it’s up to you, you’ve been warned in case that bird takes a dump in your eye.