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.
