Personal Blog of Carl Pei

After reading about a scammer rampage on the DP forums, I thought I should share a trick that I use when doing larger ($100+ USD) transactions on PayPal.

Background

PayPal has a system where, if the buyer is not happy, he/she can file a dispute against the seller, and have PayPal review it. If the buyer acts professional, uses good rhetoric and provides some kind of evidence, the PayPal staff will deduct the money from the seller’s account and transfer it into the buyer’s. The typical PayPal employee isn’t the world’s most educated and will often favor the buyer, even if the evidence is sketchy.

This opens an avenue for scammers. People might buy a website or services from you, and then chargeback, losing you time and money. To counter this, one must look at how the PayPal dispute system works. For each transaction, the buyer can file one dispute, and can choose whether or not to escalate it (let PayPal staff review it).

How to Prevent PayPal Fraud

To counter this, here is what I do: Remember that a buyer can only file a dispute once. After receiving payment from someone, I do not immediately hand over the goods. Instead, I explain to the buyer the PayPal situation and use examples (important) of times I and other people have been scammed. I tell the customer to file a dispute for the money he just paid me, and close it immediately. Now, they can’t ever open it again, even if unhappy with the product. My money is safe.

This is not only against scammers, but also inexperienced buyers who for instance after buying a site, runs it down the drain and regrets the purchase.

What started off as a fun thing has become more and more serious as of late, so this will be the last full earnings report that I’ll do. In the future, I will instead write case studies on the earnings of this blog alone. I think it will at least be as interesting as full earning reports. Ultimately, I would rather make money off blogging than websites as I think with blogging, you get paid for being yourself whereas with websites you get paid for doing what others want. In the end, you still have to conform to certain boundaries with blogging due to the fact that as with all business, the profit comes from providing value to your customers (visitors, advertisers). Anyway, here come the results followed by an analysis.

Private Ad Sales: $265.00
AdSense: $403.35
AuctionAds: $28.06
Bucks4Banners: $19.37
Chitika: $38.24
Services: $5.00
Total: $759.02

Private Ad Sales: As predicted, I sold much less inventory for May than for April, down to $265 from $485 (-$220). The mood of advertisers is hard to control and predict. With the unsold inventory, I ran more AdSense and Chitika units. It’s not all on the advertisers fault, I’ve also been lazy getting in touch with new prospective advertisers and developing new advertising packages.

AdSense: On May 28, my AdSense earnings for April found their way into my bank account. In April, I was excited to announce that I was working on a new website, and here we finally see the results. My AdSense earnings have increased to $403.35 from $170.63 (+$232.72). I’m not going to reveal the URL of the website because the concept is so simple yet awesome anyone will be able to copy it.

AuctionAds: In my March earnings I posted about AuctionAds and that I was skeptical to their program. I still am. On most days, I earn $0. One day, I suddenly earn $12 from one sale. It’s so sporadic it’s like winning the lottery for me. On the other hand, I serve them as alternative Ads when Google AdSense doesn’t have anything to show, therefore it’s more or less free money. For $28.06, I’ve sent them 549 clicks, so each click averages at 5 cents - not too bad.

Bucks4Banners: Basically free money for blogs. You get £10 for signing up, and £5 every month for inserting some code into three blog posts. I inserted the codes here, here and here. A referral gets you £5 and they accept almost anyone, even very small/new blogs. Fans of free money should sign up.

Chitika: Same old, same old. I got paid my April earnings, which didn’t increase much from March. The little increase was most likely due to the fact that I served more Chitika due to less direct advertisement deals. Things are looking better for my Chitika May earnings, which I’ll receive at the end of this month. Buy.com recently started stocking Meizu players, and once again is the keyword “meizu” high paying. Earnings have increased 2x to 3x.

In May, I saw only a marginal increase (+$33.05) from the April earnings. This was disappointing, but if the unpredictable behavior of advertisers is taken into account, it is less so. I also find comfort in the fact that just months ago did I receive my first AdSense payment, which took me a whopping 7 months+ to accumulate. In that post, I still hoped to receive AdSense payments every month. Now I don’t need to hope anymore, I know it will happen. Despite poor growth in May, I’m still grateful for what I’ve earned and learned.

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Today, a lot of poor quality sites (MFA - Made for AdSense) participating in the Google AdSense program have been removed and had their accounts terminated. Typically, such sites are full of AdSense ads with content scraped from Wikipedia and are advertised through the AdWords network for traffic. They place bids on cheap keywords and serve higher paying ads on their pages, profiting on the price difference. This business model is called arbitrage, and webmasters operating this way litters the AdSense network with low quality and low paying ads, ruining it for others.

During the middle of May, some of these people received the following email from Google:

Hello,

Our specialists regularly review partners participating in the AdSense network. After a thorough review of your account, our specialists found that your business model is not a good fit for the AdSense program.

As we’re no longer able to partner with you, your AdSense account and any related AdSense accounts will be disabled on June 1st, and ad-serving will cease at that time.

Please rest assured that you will receive payment for all outstanding earnings in accordance with the standard AdSense payment schedule. However, you are not eligible for further participation in the AdSense program.

Thank you for your understanding.
Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

It is great to see that Google is taking steps towards helping the honest, skilled and hard working publishers. The riddance of the MFA sites will make the internet a better place for everyone.

What does this mean for publishers?

I don’t know if it’s coincidental or not, but it was just days ago my main AdSense income website got smart priced to a even higher degree, causing average pay per click to fall to 1-2 cents, from the previous 7 cents.

Three days ago, I redesigned that site and had a new, better ad placement, PPC rose to 7 cents again. Today has been crazy, PPC has gone up to 12 cents. Also, I don’t think I’ve ever made this much at this time of day before, so hopefully I will peak again. Has anyone else noticed any improvements in AdSense earnings?