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!

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