As expected the promotional tools are functional. They provide a number of ‘OK looking’ banners and the usual affiliate link. There are also some fairly useful tools for analysing your referrals activity. Earnings are updated several times day which can be nice to see if your earnings are steadily increasing.
A big Positive is that SlashMySearch has a much higher pay rate than Zotspot. The screenshot below shows the payment plan:
As you can see, the proposed levels of earnings are significantly higher that Zotspot, which offers only $280 per year with a downline of 1110 people. The second level SlashMySearch referrals allow for some potentially large earnings. You and your referrals earn by using the SlashMySearch search engine and also for reading and posting on the forum.
Unfortunately, that pretty diagram is just about the only good thing about SlashMySearch. Take note of the small print in the corner, “Payment terms are Subject to Change”. SlashMySearch is one of the few programs where I have actually seen the Payment terms change dramatically; and in case you are wondering, they changed downwards
Above is a screenshot of the Alexa tracking of SlashMySearch’s Pageviews. Alexa is infamous for being an unreliable tool, but what it shows fits perfectly with my experience with SlashMySearch.
The SlashMySearch site is often down. They are very unreliable and the search engine is terrible (Hence the dramatic drops in traffic). This is the cause of the decrease in payments; they simply cannot afford their promised plan because the site is down for ‘maintenance’ so often. Admittedly they are still in ‘BETA’ and so frequent updates and additions to the site are to be expected.
In addition to these problems, they claim (much like Zotspot) that it takes them two months to collect their money from advertisers. This means you have to wait at least two months till your first payment, which is way to long!
The Alexa graph shows that SlashMySearch got off to a flying start. There was a lot of hype about them flying around in the blogosphere which has died down due to all of the problems I listed above.
Conclusion
I doubt they are an Internet scam, I trust SlashMySearch’s ‘intentions’ but not its ability to payout. For all of the reasons I mentioned SlashMySearch has not made it to my recommended affiliate programs section. In the FAQ SlashMySearch say they will be out of BETA “soon” and by then all those problems will be fixed. When that day comes I will re-review them. Fingers crossed that they fix them.
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