ClixMX Closing - No Payment to Standard Members

ClixMX has been one of my favorite PTC sites - I liked the layout (both old and new), it was uncluttered and generally easy to work with, and I'd been seeing some nice upswing there lately and was rather pleased about how things were going over there. If there had been any option at ClixMX for a Premium membership besides yearly (which I just couldn't afford at this time), I probably would have upgraded already, but I certainly had it in mind anyway for the future.

Like many PTC sites lately, it had suffered an extended outage after DDOS attacks, but came back remodeled and with some neat stuff, and I was looking forward to down the road. I didn't realize it was open again for quite a while after having checked many times and finding it still down - which was probably true of a lot of people - but I'd been back and was actually planning to cashout my measly (to anyone else maybe, tho not to me) $11 or $12 last night while I was getting organized everywhere else. And was actually kind of excited about it, as I often am about the prospect of being able to say a site that's never paid me before has paid me.

Well, guess that serves me right for planning, because when I went over there, I found this (see bold text for the particularly interesting parts of this news):

Important Announcement

I have a lot of things to tell you, but I will try to keep this short.

After the last couple of attacks (that you already know about) the site suffered a lot of damage. Many members lost trust in the site (and me), we had to invest in more security, we lost almost two weeks of ads and purchases, etc. I have tried my best this last two weeks to keep the site alive. I had to reinvest all the money we had got from the site and put $10,000.00 of my own money to keep paying and maintaining the site.

Unfortunately things didn't go quite as planned. Even though some members did help us by buying referrals or memberships (and I thank you all), sales were really low. Ad visits were very poor too, many members requested payment and stop clicking. The last few days we had over 10 ads for free members, and the average clicks per user a day was 3. We also lost many members. I am not sure if it was due to the lack of trust or to the new anti-cheat locks we added, but out of the 165,000+ active members we had before the last attack, only a little over 19,000 have returned and are active. To top it off, we had almost $100,000.00 in pending payments and we got chargeback's for almost $2,000.

For all of the above, I have decided to close the site.

I am a business man, I have my own offline business, so I know that sometime it is necessary to make a decision like this one. This is the last thing I wanted to do, but I already spent 250% more than our original budget, and got no profit. Most of that was spent in the last two weeks, and I can not keep spending money like this. This was not a easy decision to make, but I did consider all the options I had (including that poll at the forum). The PTC model is very good and it can be extremely profitable for owners and members, but at this time we have come to a point where drastic measures are necessary.

What is going to happen now?

Well, first of all I am not a scammer. I will send payments to all people who invested in the site. I know lots of standard members will complaint, but I believe that is the fairest thing to do. Payments will take sometime as I will have to use my own money (my offline business), but they will all be sent. I will include in this page a little login box where you will be able to know if you are eligible for payment. That box will be ready on Monday (I hope) as I have to review the accounts, but for now I will tell you the criteria I will use.

To be eligible for payment you...

* Must have logged in after Oct 16th and created a PIN, members that did not comeback are consider inactive and wont be paid.
* Must have invested in the site (bought referrals or premium membership).
* Did not get your investment back. If you made a profit or got your investment back, you will not be paid.

I can not tell you how long it will take to send all payments because I don't know how much money will be paid. I will have an idea on Monday.

I know how frustrated you must be (I am a member of other PTCs). I am also frustrated, angry and sad. I will open the forum again tomorrow so you can send you insults there. Please avoid sending me email as I will not be answering anything before Monday. The amount you will be paid (if you will be paid at all) will be ready then, just wait a couple of days.

This is the lastthing I wanted, and I can not apologize enough to those who trusted the site, but that's business.

Thank you,

Jose Manuel
ClixMX Admin

I'll probably have more to say about this next week, but suffice it to say I think I'm pretty much done with wasting time and effort on sites that make decisions like this about not paying free members, whether it's a site that's closing or not. Why should I spend my time clicking for months under the assumption I will get paid for it eventually - or why should I bring referrals somewhere under the same presumption - when things like this happen?

I think some of the PTC owners also need to realize that some of their free members may not have made a direct investment in the site with premium memberships or buying referrals (and again, if ClixMX had offered an option besides an entire year Premium membership, I probably would have bought a monthly or whatever) - but many of them have probably invested indirectly in buying advertising elsewhere to promote the site. I certainly did, as well as promoting plenty here, so statements like in the above just kinda burn me up.

Though the GPT/PTR side of things has it's own set of problems, it's nothing like what the PTC world is undergoing lately. I think, for the time being anyway, I'll be putting most of my efforts into GPT/PTR and PTC will just be one of those things that I will (A) not be signing up for too many new ones, (B) won't fool with when I don't have plenty of spare time, and (C) certainly won't be promoting ANY much without a cautionary word in the future.

Which is kinda sad, because I was going to do a post next week about all the PTCs I have joined lately that I haven't had time to list separately, but that list is getting smaller and smaller as time goes on anyway. Certainly won't be without a word of warning if I do.

In any case, again, probably have more to say about this next week but anyway, there ya go. Another one bites the dust and it's very disappointing to see the decisions made in its wake.

It'd be nice to be able to come back in a week or two and tell you some or all of the decisions were reversed, but I'm not holding my breath.