Zotspot

Zotspot is one of the ‘get paid to search the web’ affiliate programs that has sprung up over the past year or so. A similar program is Slashmysearch. The basic idea is simple, search the web using their search engine and they share part of the revenue they make from the advertisements with you. However there are several problems along the way.

The first and most significant disincentive for using Zotspot is the low pay rate. Below is the referral structure:

As you can see the payment is somewhat unusual. Instead of decreasing percentages of earnings the further down the chain you go, there is a flat rate of $0.25 per referral. This is per referral per year!. This means that if you have a downline of 1110 people who use zotspot as their main search engine you will make approximately $278 per year.

This is extremely low. A downline of over 1000 active referrals is pretty big in any affiliate marketers book and could make a lot of money by using numerous other affiliate programs. The latest alternative, SlashMySearch has better earnings than that despite its server being down half the time.

More of the bad

We will pay you on a monthly basis. Note that there is a 60 day delay between the time that the month closes and the time when we allocate money to your account. So it will take a month or two before you see your first earnings. After the first earnings are allocated to your account, if you continue to use zotspot search, more money will be allocated to your account approximately every 30 days.

Basically, your earnings don’t update for one whole month, so you don’t know how much you have earned. Then you have to wait another two months for the payment to be made to you. I shouldn’t have to say that this is rubbish!. They claim that the 60-day wait is for the advertisers to pay them, but even if that is true 3 months is way to long to wait to collect a few cents.

The final nail in the coffin is the distinct lack of ‘proof of payment’ floating around on the net. You would think that if people have actually been paid reasonable sums of money they would boast about it in order to recruit more referrals; but it is a challenge to find any sort of convincing proof of payment. On most of the forums no-one seems to know if Zotspot a ’scam or not’. Some people claim to have been paid pitiful amounts like $0.23, but there is no hard proof or even claims of payment for larger amounts of money.

Is there anything good?
If you have read this far given the amount of stick Zotspot has taken from me you must really be desperate to hear something good about it.

You are in luck. Just about…

The Zotspot search engine is much better than competitors like SlashMySearch, which currently has a pretty terrible search engine (it’s quality of results changes depending on your location too). Zotspot is actually good enough to use as your primary search engine and isn’t crammed full of ads. (Perhaps that’s why the pay rate is so low?).

Nevertheless this presents a problem. Many of the people who may be interested in using the Zotspot search engine are going to be affiliate marketers (like you and I). The simple fact is that no matter how accurate and fair Zotspot is, it is not Google.

I don’t use Google to merely find results, if for example I were looking for a related site to exchange links with I would use a Google search. If the site didn’t appear high enough up I would never reach it and wouldn’t offer a link exchange. This is important because most people use Google and so the ranking of a site in Google indicates it’s level of traffic and authority better than a sites ranking in Zotspot. Also the number of results is not stated on Zotspot, which is annoying for me because I use that for keyword research.

Promotional tools wise Zotspot is functional. The banner above is good enough to do the job and they provide an e-mail service, which makes it easier to mail to Hotmail addresses.

Payment is via Paypal, but remember with Zotspot that doesn’t mean fast payment.

Conclusion
It is hard to tell for sure whether Zotspot is an Internet scam. However, this is not really the issue. The pay rate is far too low to justify joining (even if they do pay) and the lengthy wait for earnings is ridiculous. For those reasons Zotspot has not made it into my recommended affiliate programs list. I should quickly mention that Zotspot has a Toolbar, which just means you can search with Zotspot with out having to visit the main page. This is no way near enough to make me change my mind about them.

I would recommend an alternative affiliate program that involves getting paid to search the web, but without a more well thought out business model that idea simply doesn’t stand up. AGLOCO is the most closely related alternative. They have taken a long time perfecting their Custom Toolbar (which is yet to be released) and so I have much more faith in them. You can read my review of AGLOCO here.