Neobux Experiment: Part 4

Status: Very promising
Deposited: $10
Current Balance: $4.973
Profit/Loss: $5.027 loss
Assets: 40 referrals

Measuring success

The problem here is trying to gauge how successful this is, when I keep ploughing my profits back into more referrals.  The loss is growing at a slower rate, which is good, but does that really mean I'm making progress?

While I'm still in this growth phase, I won't be in profit, or not by much.  When I have a larger number of referrals, I'll probably be keeping a balance greater than my original $10, but it will regularly get used.  So I need to find a different way to measure success or failure.

The question is, how do I value my assets?  What are those 40 referrals worth?  I think an appropriate measure would be cost per referral.  Dividing my loss by the number of referrals will give me an idea of how well they're doing in paying off the original purchase price.  The starting cost is 20¢/ref.  If the figure goes above 20¢/ref, they're costing more than they're making and the experiment is a failure.  Cut your losses and run.

If things are working properly, the cost/ref will head towards zero.  When the number is consistently below zero, we're in profit!  We can withdraw our initial investment and we need a different measure to look at profitability.

So how am I doing?  With the additional 10 referrals I picked up this week, my cost/ref is down to 12.6¢.  Definitely moving in the right direction.

Things that are still worrying me

This all seems to be going very well, but there are a couple of things still niggling at me.

The first is the click rate of my referrals.  It's good.  Very good.  Suspiciously good.  Most days my minions are averaging between 1.5 and 2.0 clicks each.  Reading through the forums, the most experienced people seem very happy when their average goes about 0.6.  Is it just luck?  Is it because all of mine are still relatively new, and they tend to settle down after a few months?  Do they give good referrals to new people to create a false sense of security so that they'll buy the upgrades?  I guess time will tell, but I won't be falling into the trap of putting real money into this until I know it works.

The other thing is Adprize.  Where are my Adprize wins?  People are saying click everything you can and the wins will roll in.  I've been doing that for a few weeks and I've had nothing.

When you click an ad, you get three shots at Adprize.  That means you watch another ad, and maybe win a prize.  A few Neopoints, a few cents, if you're luck, free golden membership.  Looking at the forums, people who are clicking 50 ads a day (so presumably 150 Adprize attempts) are winning at least something four days out of five.  I'm only doing about half that, but surely I should get something once a week?  Or is that only for higher level members?  They say it's random.  I'll keep plugging away at it for a while yet, hopefully something will come in.

Penny Jars v Spending Loose Change

Free money?

"It's amazing how quickly it builds up."

How often have you heard that phrase?  It'll be after someone tells you that they throw all their loose change in an old whiskey bottle, or that they save all the 20p coins they get.

"By the end of the month, there's usually fifty quid in there!"  And that's free money, right?  It just appeared out of nowhere.  We can blow that on something frivolous, because spending the penny jar doesn't really count as spending.

I used to do that, but then I realised I was fooling myself.  This isn't money I've saved, it's money I've taken out of my bank account unnecessarily.  I've been to the ATM and drawn out £50 that was previously earning interest, when there was already £50 sitting in a jar at home.  Then I'd go and blow that money as if it were an unexpected bonus rather than something that should have been part of my regular budget.

So now I spend my small change whenever I can and as a result withdraw less from the bank.

But doesn't it annoy the staff?

Depends how you do it.  If you wait until all your groceries are through the till, then start counting out £27 in pennies, yes the staff will get irritated, as will other customers.  But then if you've got that much, you're still running a penny jar; it's just being kept in your pocket instead of in a jar at home.

If you pay the odd pennies, or a couple of pounds in loose shrapnel every time you buy something with cash, then you'll generally get one of two reactions: gratitude or confusion.

Gratitude is the most common.  Most places start the day with a certain amount of change in the till.  Then, as everybody pays with a £20 note, the supply of change dwindles.  Eventually they end up having to give people a big handful of 5p coins because they've run out of 10p and 20p coins.  Restocking their float is actually very helpful to them.  You'll very rarely see the coin sections of a till overflowing, but you'll often see them empty.

Here's a top tip from my years of working in bars.  You'll get served a lot faster in a busy pub holding a couple of fivers and and a handful of change than you will waving a £20 note around.  There are never enough fivers in the world and all the coins disappear into the fruit machines.  We need to serve you first so that we have enough change for the guy buying a bag of crisps with a £20 note.

Then there's the confusion.  Some people just don't understand why you've given them the extra coins.  The bill comes to 63p.  I hand over a pound coin and 13p in change.  They look confused: "no, it's only 63p, you've given me too much".  "That's so you can give me 50p change."  They look blank, but type it in to the till anyway.  Ching change due: £0.50.  "Wow, how did you do that?".  As Arthur C Clarke said, to those who do not possess it, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.  Sadly, some people don't possess elementary arithmetic.  Just tell them it's a magic trick and walk away.

Neobux Experiment: Part 3

Status: Very promising
Deposited: $10
Current Balance: $5.495
Profit/Loss: $4.505 loss
Assets: 30 referrals

The loss is mounting, yet I've upgraded the status to very promising.  The reason the loss is mounting is because I'm investing more.  On a daily basis, it's looking very much like a profit.

When I had 20 referrals, I was getting about 32 clicks a day from them.  That's 16¢ income from an approximate daily rental fee of 10¢.  Add a little to the costs for recycling and I'm still a couple of cents a day up.  Hopefully this is scalable.

I rented a further 10 referrals on Wednesday this week.  Yesterday was my first full day with 30 and I hit 55 clicks.  27.5¢ income, rental cost around 15¢, so 12.5¢ profit!  That'll help pay for a couple of recyclings that are looking imminent.

I've been reading their forums and there's some great inspiration in there.  Some people have huge numbers of referrals and are making well over $50 a day.  However, most of these people have also invested huge sums of real money (over $20k in some cases) to get there.  That's a lot of money to put into something that could all come crashing down tomorrow.  I've invested my $10 and that's it.  Gradual climb from here on in.

So where did all that money go?  Obviously renting thousands of referrals costs a lot, but a lot of it also goes on upgrades and extensions.  The advice running through all the forum threads is "Extend! Extend! Upgrade! Upgrade!".  But the numbers don't seem to quite work for me.  I'll lay out my reasoning here, please comment if I'm missing anything.

Extending

When you rent a referral, you get them for 30 days.  Even if you recycle, you still only own that slot for the remainder of those 30 days.  If you let the rental lapse, you lose the person, which you don't want to do if they're a good performer.  So extending in itself is desirable.  The question is, for how long?  Longer periods get discounts, so surely you go for as long as possible, so the fees don't cut too deep into your profits.

A 30 day extension costs 20¢.  Extending for the maximum 240 days gets you a 30% discount, so it costs $1.12, so 0.47¢ a day against 0.67¢, a saving of one fifth of a cent per referral per day.

I'm currently using the autopay system, which takes a daily fee of 0.57¢ to extend for one day, but only if that referral has clicked that day and has at least 20 days left on the clock.  So a little saving there.  However, they all miss days here and there and so are gradually falling off the autopay.

Thus, say the forums, you must always extend 240 days as soon as possible.  You'd be mad not to, right?

But I have limited funds and I need to grow my population.

Let's say I have 10 referrals coming up for extension and I have the cash to go 240 days.  $11.20 spent, to give ma an extra 2¢ a day.

What if I go for 30 day extensions and use the rest to buy more referrals?  $2 for the extension, $9.20 to spend on 46 more referrals.  So long as those 46 referrals make more than 2¢ a day between them, surely this is a better option?  If the profit on 46 referrals doesn't add up to 2¢ a day, then this whole thing isn't worth doing.

There comes a point where you're limited on how many referrals you can get.  At this point, if you've got the cash, the long extension is worth it.  Until then, I'm going for growth.

Upgrades

I'm a Standard member.  That means that I get 0.5¢ per click from my referrals and I can have up to 300 referrals.

The next level is Golden.  This costs $90 a year, puts your limit up to 2,000 referrals and doubles your income to 1¢ per click.  It also allows free recycling after 14 days inactive, but I don't want people who are inactive that long.

So right now, buying Golden would double my 25¢/day income, giving me an extra $91.25 over the year.  So I'm about at the break even point where this is kind of worth doing.

But with the same reasoning as above, if I had $90 to play with, wouldn't I be better off buying up to my limit of 300 referrals?  That'll take my 25¢ to $2.50 a day.

Again, I'll grow till I can grow no more, then take the Golden for the sudden doubling and a bit of headroom.  I think Golden membership looks more worthwhile than 240 day extensions, so I'll do that first.

After Golden, you're looking at Ultimate membership.  It's $890 a year.  That's a lot of money.  It doesn't change the income per click, but does allow 4,000 referrals by the usual methods, then unlimited numbers in batches of 200 using the 'rental queue' system.  So if you want to grow big, this is necessary.

Ultimate also gives you access to 'vacation mode', meaning that you don't have to do any of your own clicking to get the credit for referral clicks.  Seems like when you hit the big numbers, you can just sit back and watch the money roll in.

I'll give some serious thought to Ultimate when I'm nearing the 2,000 referral mark, but that won't be for some time yet.

Want to give it a go?

I've been holding off recommending people try Neobux so far, but it seems to be working.  Give it a go, it's strangely quite fun.  You can start from zero investment and build up your fund from clicking ads, invest $10 like I did, or more like some of these people if you're feeling adventurous.  Let me know how you get on!

Sign up here

Neobux Experiment: Part 2

Status: Promising
Deposited: $10
Current Balance: $6.935
Profit/Loss: $3.065 loss
Assets: 20 referrals

I wouldn't go so far as to call it profitable yet, but it's starting to look like it could be.

I rented my first ten referrals last Wednesday.  Over the next couple of days, eight of them proved to be active, which was a lot better than I'd expected.  I waited a couple more days, then recycled the two who hadn't done anything (at a cost of 7c each).  The two new guys started working very quickly.  Amazingly I had ten productive referrals out of ten.

The numbers went up and down over the next couple of days, but the averages were looking good.  One of the referrals stopped producing, so I hit my third recycle after a week.

One week in and my balance was back up above $9 (having gone down to $8 after buying the first set of referrals).  Although most the gain was from my own activity, including a 50c win on the hourly lottery (you get a free ticket for each ad you click), the referrals seem to be paying their way.  The only reason that my activity is more profitable so far is that I have a small number of referrals.  I can see it working well with larger numbers.

So I rented another ten this Wednesday.  This batch seem less productive than the last lot, with five yet to click anything, but it's less than 48 hours in, so I'll give them a chance.

Overall, it seems to be moving in the right direction.  I won't call ir profitable as I'm not in profit yet, but I'm hopeful that I will be within a couple of weeks.

Managing the referrals has oddly been quite fun.  I'm proud of my minions.  I also get pathetically excited when I wake up in the morning to find an extra 6c in my account!  Imagine how I'd feel if it were real money.

Neobux Experiment: Part 1

So I keep seeing adverts for Neobux and I can't decide whether it looks dodgy or like a great opportunity.  I decided to find out, so here's my experiment.

I've decided to risk $10 of my other online income to find out if this is as lucrative as people on the forums are suggesting.  Could have started with nothing, but it would've taken forever to build up, so I'll kick start it with something I don't mind losing.  People are talking about making $20, $50 or even $100 a day with this.  Sounds fanciful, but wouldn't it be nice if it were true?

How does Neobux work?

Fundamentally, it's a pay-to-click advertising site.  Like all the others, they pay you next to nothing for looking at adverts for a few seconds.  Not worth doing on its own.  Also like the others, you can earn a commission for adverts seen by your referrals.  Nothing new so far.

The difference here, and the thing that's either brilliant or dodgy, is that they will rent you referrals.  Rather than having to pester your friends and spam Facebook and Twitter, you can pay a monthly rental for someone to potentially earn you some money.  It all depends on how the numbers work out.

So let's look at the numbers.

There are different levels of membership and most online guides I've seen are very focussed on what happens when you hit the higher levels.  From my point of view, I want to see if I can fundamentally make money, so I'll just deal with the standard level membership and deal with the higher levels when and if I get to them.

Clicking on adverts yourself mostly gets you $0.001 (with the occasional $0.01).  You have to click at least four ads a day to receive anything from your referrals the following day.

Clicks by referrals are worth $0.005 to you.

Renting a referral costs $0.20 for the first month, then can be extended for $0.005 per day (around $0.15 per month).  So you can see that a referral averaging just over one click per day will pay for itself.  Anything over that is profit.

The site shows you how each referral is performing.  If you don't like how one is doing (ie their average is too low), you can 'recycle' them, drop them out and get someone different in their place for a fee of $0.07

The idea is that you gradually weed out the bad ones and build yourself a team of quality workers to turn over a good profit.

The experiment begins

I started on Tuesday night (it's Friday now), by doing my four clicks, so I can make money from referrals the following day.

Wednesday lunchtime, I rented my first ten referrals.  It seems that keeping a balance of around $1 per referral is advisable, to pay for extensions and recycling.

I was expecting junk, thinking I'd gradually erode my $10 paying for recycle after recycle.  Maybe get one or two good ones if I'm luck.

On the first full day, five of my ten referrals did 4 clicks each.  That's 2 cents each, profitable if they can keep it up.  Now into the second day, a sixth one has kicked in and the first one has done another 4 clicks.  It's a slow start, but promising.

I'll give the other four a couple more days to wake up, then recycle them.

The numbers so far:

Deposited: $10
Current balance $8.175
Profit/Loss: $1,825 loss

So I've made back 17 cents from the $2 I spent after just a couple of days.  The coming weeks should be interesting.

Thinking of trying it out?

Give it a week or two (or more) to see how it's panning out for me.  If it looks profitable, I'll post a referral link.

August 2015

£165.15 in August, bringing the total to £589.28, 29% of our target done.

Bit of a slow month, due to holidays and the like, but still a decent income.  Most of it came from my pending Clixsense balance finally paying off.

Prolific Academic continues to be a firm favourite.  I cashed out £21 early in the month and have another £15 waiting at the end of the month.  Emma's up to about £100, but we're leaving that in for Christmas.

Good balances are building up on numerous other sites, so hoping for a good September.

One good source of contention has been Lucky Phone.  This free daily lottery lets you build up small prizes as well as the £10 daily jackpot.  I've been getting one or two 25-50p wins a week, bringing my balance to £4.50.  Emma has had nothing and is now sulking.  We're also doing Free postcode lottery and The Selfie Lottery, but these are jackpot only, so we don't see the gradual progress towards a cashout.

Here's this month's breakdown:

Source	August	Total	Guide	Sign up
Clixsense	£105.50	£192.67	Clixsense Guide	Clixsense*
Prolific Academic	£21.00	£72.44	Prolific Guide	ProlifcAdademic*
Quidco	£0.00	£43.20	Quidco Guide	Quidco*
MySurvey	£0.00	£45.00	MS Guide	MySurvey
Global Test Market	£0.00	£35.00	GTM Guide	GlobalTestMarket*
WorkShopPlay	£0.00	£25.00	WSP Guide	WorkShopPlay
Pru Health	£0.00	£22.50	n/a	n/a
Halifax	£17.65	£38.37	Halifax Guide	Halifax
Valued Opinions	£0.00	£20.00	V O Guide	ValuedOpinions
MyView	£0.00	£20.00	MyView Guide	n/a
Shop & Scan	£0.00	£20.00	S&S Guide	n/a
Selling stuff	£12.00	£24.00	n/a	n/a
Else	£0.00	£10.00	n/a	n/a
Top Cashback	£0.00	£5.64	TopCashback Guide	TopCashback*
The Viewers	£0.00	£5.50	Viewers Guide	TheViewers
John Lewis	£5.00	£5.00	n/a	n/a
Communispace	£4.00	£4.00	n/a	n/a
Qmee	£0.00	£0.96	Qmee Guide	Qmee*
Total	£165.15	£589.28

*If you sign up using this link, we will receive a bonus, but it won't cost you anything.

The Point

All this hard work, the saving, the extra money on the side, why do we do it?

The answer seems pretty obvious, but I though it might help me to write it down, quantify it a little so I can see how we progress.

I see it as three phases: Stability, Lifestyle and Sufficiency.  The goal is to progress though these.  They can be measured by four variables:

A is total net earned income, from our jobs.
B is investment income and interest.  This will include pensions when they eventually become payable.
C is additional income.  Surveys, online income, the other bits we blog about here.
D is spending.  That's our bills, mortgage, groceries, holidays, going out, hobbies, everything.


Phase 1: Stability

You are in the stability phase if your total income exceeds your total expenditure, but your expenditure is less than you would like it to be.

A + B +C > D

Here, you're making a gain every month, putting money into savings.  You'd like to live in a bigger house, go on more holidays, eat out more often, but you moderate these things to stay in surplus.

As Mr Micawber said "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen [pounds] nineteen [shillings] and six [pence], result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."

Keep working hard, earning more money, keep an eye on your budget.  The bigger you make that surplus every month, the faster you can make B grow, to help you move on to phase 2.

Phase 2: Lifestyle

Ok, you've worked hard, earned the promotions and pay rises; you've saved hard and got some nice investment income trickling through.  Your surplus is getting bigger.  Maybe it's time to live a little.  So now you can start to increase D.  You get the things you've been denying yourself, move to the dream house, have the nice holidays.  You squeeze the surplus, but make sure you're in surplus.  Once you're spending everything you want to spend, but still running a surplus, you've achieved phase 2.

It's difficult to know when to make the transition from stability to lifestyle.  The longer you wait in phase 1, the easier the transition will be and the easier it'll be to get to phase 3, but you still want to enjoy life while you're still young enough.  In practice, a gradual ramp up of the spending to keep the surplus as high as possible is probably a good plan.

Phase 3: Sufficiency

The ultimate goal, where you're spending what you want and you have enough investment income to cover it.  Now you can stop working.  You don't need that money any more.

B > D

This isn't easy to achieve and most people never get there.  It'll help when the pensions kick in and bills tend to drop off later in life.  

Maybe if we work really hard, we can get here before we're old.  Retire early and enjoy life.  It's a bold ambition and it certainly won't be easy, but it's good to have something to aim for.  

We're going to aim high and if we fall short, all the hard work will make sure that we land in a good place.

July 2015

£340.86 in July, bringing the total to £424.13, 21% of our target done after just two months.

Still got a big chunk pending on Clixsense and also a fair amount on Prolific Academic, so August will be off to a good start.

This month's favourite site is Prolific Academic.  It's a fairly new survey site used by universities to gather information for their research.  Their pre-screening is excellent, so you never get screened out half way through, pay is good and fast and there's plenty of work available.  The £50 below is just what I've banked this month.  I've got another £11 pending and I only started on 3 July!  Emma hasn't cashed out yet, but she's sitting on another £40, having started a week after me.

If you're only going to sign up to one survey site, make it Prolific Academic.

Here's this month's breakdown:

Source	July	Total	Guide	Sign up
Clixsense	£65.58	£87.17	Clixsense Guide	Clixsense*
Prolific Academic	£51.44	£51.44	Prolific Guide	ProlifcAdademic*
Quidco	£43.20	£43.20	Quidco Guide	Quidco*
MySurvey	£30.00	£45.00	MS Guide	MySurvey
Global Test Market	£35.00	£35.00	GTM Guide	GlobalTestMarket*
WorkShopPlay	£25.00	£25.00	WSP Guide	WorkShopPlay
Pru Health	£22.50	£22.50	n/a	n/a
Halifax	£5.00	£20.72	Halifax Guide	Halifax
Valued Opinions	£0.00	£20.00	V O Guide	ValuedOpinions
MyView	£20.00	£20.00	MyView Guide	n/a
Shop & Scan	£20.00	£20.00	S&S Guide	n/a
Selling stuff	£12.00	£12.00	n/a	n/a
Else	£0.00	£10.00	n/a	n/a
Top Cashback	£5.64	£5.64	TopCashback Guide	TopCashback*
The Viewers	£5.50	£5.50	Viewers Guide	TheViewers
Qmee	£0.00	£0.96	Qmee Guide	Qmee*
Total	£340.86	£424.13

*If you sign up using this link, we will receive a bonus, but it won't cost you anything.

Pru Health is a nice little bonus.  Emma gets private medical cover through work and they pay her cash once a quarter for not smoking.  As someone who has never smoked, that's a really easy thing to achieve.

Selling Stuff  Sold an old desk and chair on Facebook.  Now the room that was an office contains a beer fridge and a comfy chair.  Perfect place to sit and blog.

Shop & Scan seemed like a bit of a faff at first, scanning all our shopping before we can put in in cupboards, but I've been pleasantly surprised how fast the money is building up.

June 2015

£83.27 in June.  That's 4.2% of our target done.

Looks like a slow start, but that's only counting what we've banked, or "real money" as I like to call it.

This doesn't include the $188 (around £120) pending on my Clixsense account.  I'll get that in August.  There are also small amounts kicking around on other sites, too small to cash out right now.  I'll only include them once we've got the money.

Here's how it breaks down:

Source	Amount	Guide	Sign up
MySurvey	£15.00	MS Guide	MySurvey
ValuedOpinions	£20.00	V O Guide	ValuedOpinions
Qmee	£0.96	Qmee Guide	Qmee*
Clixsense	£21.59	Clixsense Guide	Clixsense*
ELSE	£10.00	n/a	n/a
Halifax	£15.72	Halifax Guide	Halifax

*If you sign up using this link, we will receive a bonus, but it won't cost you anything.

The Valued Opinions payout was in the form of John Lewis vouchers.  They don't give cash, but other vouchers are available.

The Halifax part was cashback on using their credit card.  They offered 10% cashback on a Sainsbury's shop, so guess where we did our shopping this month!

ELSE run experiments for the economics department at UCL (where I study), unfortunately it's for students only.  They oversubscribed on this occasion and I 'lost' the random selection, so they gave me £10 to go away.

Qmee may be a small amount, but it's practically no effort, so a nice little extra.

Clixsense is the clear winner at the moment.  On top of that £21.59, we're expecting another £45 tonight and so far about £120 in August, all from about 3 weeks on the site.  From what I can see, there's about £150-£200 each of easy money available from this site, then it'll probably slow down to a relative trickle of £10-£20 a month.  The microtasks could work out lucrative, but not until I've built up my scores on that part, which is painfully slow going at the moment.  If you sign up using the link above, I'll tell you exactly where all the easy money comes in.

Here's what my Clixsense account looks like right now:

My PTC Clicks	today 0   total 155   earned $0.8560
My ClixGrid Clicks	today 0   total 716   earned $0.20
My Completed Tasks	today 1   total 49   earned $0.72
My Completed Offers	today 0   total 45   earned $10.33   pending $188.61
Earnings	today $0.0626   yesterday $0.1506   month $6.8349   year $47.5618 last month $40.7269   last year $0.0000   total $47.5618
Movements	payouts $35.24   fundings $13.78   purchases $17.00
Balance	$0.0618   Add to Pending Cashout
Pending Payout	$9.05   Cancel

How much can we make in our spare time?

For some time, Emma has been using online survey sites to generate extra income.  I'd always dismissed it as a waste of time, too much effort for too little money.

Then I took a serious look at the amounts she's receiving and it does add up.  It's not going to make us rich, but it'll pay for our holidays and maybe some Christmas presents.

At this point the geek in me emerged.  I thought I should research this area properly, experiment and record the results.  Refine the method, improve productivity...

Early results are promising, but just how much can we make in one year?  It's good to have a target, so let's aim for £2,000.

Us

We are a couple in our mid 30s, living at Emma's place in East London during the week and my place in Essex at the weekend.  We both work full time and I'm also studying part time for a masters in physics.  Along with the usual hobbies, social life etc, this doesn't leave a lot of time to spare, so whatever we do here has to be squeezed in where we can.

Methods

We're mostly looking at the little things that add up.  Mostly stuff that can be done online.

Naturally we'll be restricting ourselves to activities which are legal, decent and honest.  No shady dealing, no adult content, no con games.  All legitimate income.  Unfortunately this means much of it is also taxable income, but we'll discuss that with the tax man at the end of the year.

We'll be doing surveys, focus groups, microtasks, getting cashback, blogging, anything interesting that comes along.

The internet is full of get-rich-quick schemes which seem mostly to be pretty dodgy.  We avoid those.  If someone really had a method for making two grand a day for five minutes work, they wouldn't be selling it to you for £100.  They would rent an office, get some computers and pay a bunch of people minimum wage to do it for them and make a fortune for themselves.  At least, that's what I would do.

However, if someone tells me I can make £10 a month for a couple of minutes work a day, it seems possible, I'll look into it, see if there's a way to up the return.

I'm generally not keen on paying an up-front fee for membership, but may be flexible if the research makes it look worthwhile, or reliable sources tell me it'll be worth it.