Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Bubblews review: Scam or legit website to make money online?


Bubblews is a website where users can submit short articles and earn money when they are viewed, commented on, liked or shared. The promised earnings for the users are very impressive and the question is if Bubblews is too good to be true. Is Bubblews a scam or a legit and revolutionary novel way for users to monetize their articles?

best bubblews review earningsSeveral people from completely different sources have contacted me regarding a new revenue-sharing website known as Bubblews. The website has the motto of "Speak Freely. Write Your World" and is advertised as providing users a platform where they can publish their short articles (400 characters minimum) and earn money when the articles are viewed, commented on, liked or shared. 
Obviously, revenue-sharing article websites are nothing new and the internet is filled with such websites including Hubpages, Infobarrel and Squidoo. However, what apparently sets Bubblews apart from the rest is that it promises extremely high earnings. For example, Bubblews promises its users $0.01 per view, and for each like, comment or share (social media) that a post receives the users can earn even more money depending on how much advertisement revenues that Bubblews pulls in. Still $0.01 per impression as we all know is a CPM rate that is incredibly high. After doing some research I decided to give Bubblews a go to evaluate if it is truly a legit website or yet another scam website.

Overview of Bubblews earning mechanisms

top bubblews earnings review potential scam legitRegistration on Bubblews is very easy and completely automated, meaning that anyone with a working e-mail address can sign up and get an account. Once the user confirms his/her e-mail the user will be allowed to create new posts on Bubblews. As most websites dealing with user contents, there are rules on Bubblews, most of which are common sense. For example, the contents are to be family-safe topics, meaning that adult, violent or other illegal topics are prohibited. In addition, plagiarism of text or pictures is obviously not allowed either. Finally, Bubblews requires all posts to be at least 400 characters long to prevent short non-sense posts.

The terms of service certainly do make Bubblews appear legit and the site itself states that it shares its revenues from advertisements in a 50-50 fashion with its users, which is why it can pay out such high amounts to the users. Furthermore, Bubblews states that it is novel in the sense that it encourages its users to interact socially in a social-network like scheme which is why it rewards its users with high earnings if their posts are commented, liked or shared. Therefore, users should connect to other users and in this way interact to boost the potential earnings.

The earnings are registered by Bubblews and the users can monitor their earnings in real time through their The Bank page. Once the payment threshold of $25 is reached, redemption can be requested. At present Bubblews supports payment through Paypal, check, VISA gift card and Buy me this, being an option where Bubblews can purchase an item from an online store for a user. 

It should be noted that the redemption process is manual and every user who requests for redemption are reviewed by the Bubblews team to ensure that all posts and activities are within the rules. Upon redemption, the user is given a notification that the Bubblews team will get back to them within 72 hours.


Does Bubblews pay or is it a scam?

 

bubblews review scam pay earnings I gave Bubblews a serious chance and has today a total of 83 unique, and original posts with my own images, making sure that all posts were within the guidelines and terms of service of Bubblews. At first, it was encouraging to see my accumulated earnings in The Bank growing. By participating actively socially with other users, I reached the payment threshold of $25 already within one week and 20-ish posts. Needless to say, I was excited and attempted to redeem. 
For the redemption process I chose Paypal and filled in all the necessary information. I was given the notification that the redemption was in process and Bubblews would get back to me within 72 h. However, this simply never happened. Today, almost 3 months since my first redemption, Bubblews has not gotten back to me. Instead, I was told by other users and other sources on the internet that I must have broken some kind of rule. I attempted to contact Bubblews multiple times with no response. In any case, I decided not to give up and continued. 

More than one week after, I once again reached the payment threshold. This time I had almost 50 posts and were even more certain that I did not break any rules. Unfortunately, once again my redemption was unsuccessful without Bubblews providing any information whatsoever within the 72-h window that they claimed. 

I decided to give Bubblews a third chance and continued to post contents there and participated actively in the community. I managed to reach the payment threshold after yet another weeks and redeemed again. This time, Bubblews actually got back to me and I could see the payment as pending on my Paypal account. However, strangely, after approximately 1 week, the pending payment was cancelled and according to Paypal, the cancellation was initiated by the payer, that is, Bubblews. Naturally, I attempted to contact Bubblews, but once again no response was provided by Bubblews.

At this point, I decided to drop my activity there altogether. My earnings continued to grow and after 1 month I could redeem once again. To no surprise, no follow-up was given by Bubblews and this fourth redemption was a failure as well.

To me, based on my own experiences, Bubblews is definitely classified as a scam, but I believe that the situation is more complex and Bubblews is actually running a very elaborate scam scheme that has many similarities to a pyramid scheme.


The Bubblews scam: Pyramid scheme in disguise

bubblews scam scheme review earnings payAt this point, it is difficult to argue that Bubblews at best is a suspicious site and at worse a very elaborate scam website under a facade of being legit. While my story alone certainly can be questioned, it does not take very long to find countless of other users who also claim that they have never been paid. However, this is not the surprising part. The surprising part is the sheer number of users who also claim that they are paid in a timely fashion. These two clearly contradicting opinions raises some concerns.

First of all, Bubblews does not allow anyone to post articles about their payment issues on the site. Such posts are deleted promptly and can result in the account being terminated. Therefore, complaining users are found through third party sources, that is, Google search. This also means that the Bubblews website itself is filled with posts of users claiming to have successfully redeemed, flooding the search engine results similarly. Not too surprisingly, third party stories of successful redemption are, on the other hand, very difficult to find. This definitely is something which makes little sense for a fully legit website.

Therefore, it appears that Bubblews is running some sort of elaborate scam scheme where certain individuals are paid, but the vast majority are not. Those few who are paid will subsequently run to the rescue and defend Bubblews claiming that those who did not get paid broke the rules. Since Bubblews itself never communicates why a payment is denied, this of course places the users who are not paid in a limbo, not knowing exactly what went wrong. Instead these users are encouraged to continue to contribute contents to Bubblews such that the site owners can make even more money based on user contents. 

In a nutshell, Bubblews can choose to not pay a user without any motivations and have a small army of favored users defend their actions. This small army will then contribute to building up a hype around Bubblews to attract even more users to provide more contents for Bubblews. At arbitrary and given times, Bubblews will then "award" some additional users with proper payments and the whole thing just continues, benefiting primarily the site owners while in essence stealing the work of the majority of its users.

While I am convinced that Bubblews is a scam, I am sure that some of you may not be entirely convinced at this point, therefore I have compiled the following list of facts which support the scam scheme that Bubblews is employing.

Bubblews scam scheme supporting facts

  • Payment rates: The single most obvious giveaway of the scam scheme is the promised payment rates. Disregarding earnings from likes, comments and social-media shares, Bubblews is offering its users a $0.01 earning per view of their posts. For anyone remotely familiar with web-content advertisements, it is easy to realize that this simply makes no sense whatsoever. The payment rate advertised would result in a CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) of $10, which is an amount far from even the best paying advertisement networks, and this is even without considering the fact that the earnings are split 50-50 by Bubblews and that far from every post view corresponds to an ad unit impression. Therefore, for Bubblews to offer this kind of high earnings, they must simply only pay a small portion of its users unless they intend to run the website as a charity.
  • Google Pagerank: Bubblews currently has a pagerank of 2, which is extremely and alarmingly low for a website that deals with money transactions.  
  • Domain under privacy protection: The Bubblews domain is registered under privacy protection which is something that always raises a red flag. While there may be legitimate reasons for this, usually such domains conduct activities that are, at best in the grey-zone.
  • Classified as high-risk by Scamadviser: Bubblews falls under the category of top 10% high-risk websites per data collected by Scamadviser.
  • User complaints: User complaints are moderated and may never be published on the Bubblews site. For a site that deals with money, the number of articles claiming that Bubblews is a scam site by itself rings some bells, in essence regardless of the contents.
  • No communication: Again a typical giveaway. Bubblews never provides any reasons for a denied payment and does not communicate with its users in any way that would make it appear as a legitimate service.
  • Removal of posts result in negative earnings: This is just humorous, but if a user removes posts after a redemption, the earnings actually become negative, indicating that the user owes Bubblews money, even though they provided the contents themselves. 
  • Poorly managed website: The website is filled with junk, some of which are blatantly plagiarized. Yet the website does very little to actively remove such contents. For any legitimate websites, removal of plagiarized contents and low-quality contents should be of utmost importance in order to not risk being penalized or banned from search engines. For Bubblews which even runs AdSense ads, clearly this shows how little the administrators care.
  • Allow very short posts: Minimum length of an article is as low as 400 characters which does not make any sense at all since it breaks all common search engine optimization (SEO) principles.

 

Conclusion: Bubblews is a scam website

No matter how much I want to believe otherwise, Bubblews does indeed fall within the category of a scam website. It does, however, differ from conventional scam websites in that it employs a rather elaborate scheme involving favoring certain users and in this way attract new users to write and provide more contents for it for free. In the end, by participating in Bubblews, you are only filling the pockets of its owners and simultaneously contributing in ripping off hard-working people who have written original articles for Bubblews.

In the end, if something appears too good to be true, it probably is, and this absolutely applies for the case of Bubblews. The CPM rate of at least $10 offered upfront is simply nonsense.


16 comments:

  1. I am a "bubbler," meaning I write for Bubblews. I had an issue with payment as well. They were several payments behind and did not get in touch with me after over 70 emails from me. I contacted an attorney and mentioned this on Facebook. Another bubbler on Facebook contacted the owner. I had an email from the owner within minutes. I was paid, in full, in matter of days.

    I am guessing that words like "attorney," "breach of contract," "Better Business Bureau" and "Attorney General" are understood by the owner. I haven't had a problem since.

    I write several places online and never had a problem anywhere. Now that I've mentioned "those words," I am paid without any problems. When I do "work it" and write there, I cash out daily.

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    1. Thank you for your comment and for sharing your story Emma Riley Sutton!

      I personally think that it is very sad that you actually had to go through the trouble of contacting an attorney and also to make it public on Facebook just to get what you rightfully deserve, own and earn through their (Bubblews') own terms of agreement.

      However, I am happy to know though that you actually did get paid and that you are continued to do so. In any case, it does appear that through your actions, you have managed to be escalated to one of their "favored" users and can continue to enjoy the high payment rate. The story becomes in particularly interesting, considering the track along what would have happened if you had not taken the course of action.

      While I do not doubt that more individuals could force Bubblews to pay them by similar course of actions, I believe that this just further demonstrates the fact that Bubblews is attempting to scam its hard working users of their hard earned money.

      Delete
    2. I've been a professional writer for over 20 years. This was not my "first rodeo." Although this had never happened to me with my online writing, I have had clients think they didn't have to pay me. I've learned that, usually, a letter from an attorney is all it takes to be be paid. In this case, it didn't even take a letter.

      Unfortunately, many writers do not know this. They continue to work without being paid, not understanding there is a simple course of action that can be taken.

      I do not consider myself to be "favored" by Bubblews. I simply do my job, which is to write according to their rules. I expect them to follow the terms of service/use that they outlined. If they do not do this, I know what to do. If I did not know what to do, contact my attorney, I truly believe I never would have been paid. Instead of being favored, I am certain I am considered a "troublemaker" and my work is more closely looked at than many others who write there.Which is fine with me. As long as I follow their rules, which I do, and they follow the rules, there won't be a problem.

      Many writers do not know they do not have to "take it." They write, in hopes of getting paid. They do not realize they need to have a contract with their clients, follow that contract to the letter and expect their clients to do the same.

      Delete
  2. I did a whois lookup for this site bubblews.com here
    WhoisXY.com Here i got formatted information. Then i have searched some reviews in Google finally i saw some reviews here http://www.scamadviser.com/ i got this message "
    Low Trust Rating. This Site May Not Be Safe to Use." From the above details, this site seems to be scam .

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you enlighten for your comments and the additional information provided. I totally concur with your conclusions and I hope that you found the information useful and that others in the future will also be weary before venturing in the suspicious scheme employed by Bubblews.

      Delete
  3. Bubblews is a scam! I haven't got my 6 missing payments. They deleted 4 of my most viewed, liked and commented posts without any explanations at all. My posts were also featured in the front page and top news. I emailed them several times and didn't get any proper response. It's not worth my time! They are definitely a joke!

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    Replies
    1. Thanks for dropping by and for your input Betchay! Indeed it is difficult for me to draw any other conclusion than that Bubblews is a big and elaborate scam scheme as well.

      Delete
  4. I am a four month veteran of Bubblews. I've been paid in a very timely fashion every single time I submitted for a redemption. I have not met many on the site (I have almost 1700 connections) who claim the site is a scam, but rather growing so fast it experiences technical difficulties every so often. Unfortunately there are some that view the site in a negative fashion and threaten to destroy it or rather "expose" it as a scam.

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    Replies
    1. Well, four months is hardly veteran, considering that the site has been around for years. But certainly, it could be such that you are one of the lucky ones at the top of the pyramid that gets paid in a timely fashion. For that, I congratulate you. However, connections, first of all, are meaningless on Bubblews and they are purely used for personal gains to attract views/comments/likes. They say nothing about the truth, in particular as Bubblews is notorious for removing negative comments or posts.

      Secondly, I do not understand why anyone would want to "destroy" the site by exposing it as a scam if it was not. If it really was the wonderful site that it claims it is, then people would spend their time there to publish stuff and make money rather than ranting or writing lengthy articles elsewhere.

      Certainly, even if Bubblews was legit, some individuals would always be negative to it due to random reasons, but the vast number of negative comments around the internet does tell something on the background of the site.

      In any case, I thank you for your input and hope that you will continue to enjoy your benefits there!

      Delete
  5. Bubblews actually pays, but they pay selectively, usually those who has more connections and popularities. Just as you said, they don't let you to publish posts about not being paid. This is to prevent members from giving up writing; meanwhile those who got paid are allowed to write about them getting paid, making those people thinks that they have violated one of the rules.

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  6. Bubblews is horrible. I don't know if they're scammers or just incredibly disorganized. I wrote out my entire sordid experience here, in case anyone in interested in another objective opinion: http://voices.yahoo.com/is-bubblewscom-scam-12594625.html?cat=9

    ReplyDelete
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