Google Cash Detective Day 14—Forum is Back but is Now Censored
March 24th 2009 10:29 pm
Well, the forum is finally back up. It looks like it went up two days ago.
But as I suspected would happen, all of the previous posts are gone, most of which were from some very disgruntled people complaining (justifiably) about the lack of customer service, support, and communication from Chris Carpenter.
Now I really think that the whole “our forums were messing up the performance of the tool” was a total farce and it was just an excuse to delete all the negative threads.
But the good news is that I made a second sale!
Today someone bought one of the Clickbank products I’m promoting.
Here are my stats so far:
Product 1: 20 impressions, 0 clicks.
Product 2: 4,960 impressions, 211 clicks, ad cost: 86.47, 1 sale (16.61)
Product 3: 14,410 impressions, 110 clicks, ad cost: 68.27, 0 sales
Product 4: 12,121 impresssions, 95 clicks, cost: 64.84, 1 sale (22.62)
So here’s the depressing summary:
I spent $219.58 to make $39.23.
Well, I say ‘make’ but that isn’t really even true. Clickbank has this policy that they won’t give you a dime of your commission until you get 4 or 5 different sales. They say it is because they want to make sure you aren’t just using your Clickbank account to buy products for yourself at a reduced rate, but I think that’s a bunch of bonk.
They could easily compare the name on the credit card or Paypal account with the name they’re sending checks to.
But anyway…I still have a couple of weeks to decide if I’m going to keep my Cash Detective membership. Unless I make a few hundred dollars **profit** in that time, it is extremely doubtful.
What I’m going to do next it try to figure out how to see what keyword my sale came from using the Google Cash Automator.
Addendum: Here’s an interesting fact about their forum. Now they have moderators approving every post before it shows up. If you write anything negative about the product, it doesn’t make it past the gatekeepers.
Here is a post I made in the forum in response to a poster who noticed the old posts are all missing.
My post:
The day the forum went down I had a sneaky suspicion that all the posts would mysteriously vanish. I really wonder if their ‘reason’ for taking down the forum was a farce and it was really to delete all the negative threads. Which is a bummer because I really did find some useful training info from fellow members.
==== Moderator’s Reply
"Hmmm. You are entitled to your opinion. But this sort of post will just cause negativity. It has been removed. If you don’t like our moderation, and you are unhappy with the way things are going, please open a support ticket and your concerns will be addressed.
We hired a person full time to manually cut and paste the best content from the old forums. This is an on-going process. It is real. I hurt my hand cutting and pasting over 90 entire posts. They are distributed around the forum.
The old forum broke, and we are now using a totally different piece of software now. It is much newer, and has been heavily customized. So – concerning your allegations that it “was a farce” - I would like to set the record straight with you, and I don’t think GCD staff should have to prove our claims in public, in an open debate.
Thanks,
Jonathan
P.S. – It is nothing personal, but I’m not all that keen to fight opinions, lies and allegations in the forums. The moderators have too many important tasks to attend to …"
It’s probably true that they really did have problems with the forum software, I’ll admit that. But censoring every post that is negative just doesn’t seem right.
In fact, someone started a thread that the Google Cash Detective posts should not have to pass through a moderator first. They said they haven’t seen any other forum that requires this, and since everyone on the forum is a paid member anyway, free speech should be allowed. After a few posts of people who agreed, the moderator posted the following. And then he locked the forum so no one else could comment on it:
"We understand all of the advantages, and the disadvantages to this approach. There are many other forums online, that offer an unmoderated, “free place” to learn and share. In our quest to offer the best information possible, we have decided to moderate each and every forum post at GCD. This decision will certainly irritate many of you, but we believe it’s for the best … We hope you will see the wisdom of this approach in the future, as our forum continues to grow with high quality content. The GCD forums will continue to be moderated."
But as I suspected would happen, all of the previous posts are gone, most of which were from some very disgruntled people complaining (justifiably) about the lack of customer service, support, and communication from Chris Carpenter.
Now I really think that the whole “our forums were messing up the performance of the tool” was a total farce and it was just an excuse to delete all the negative threads.
But the good news is that I made a second sale!
Today someone bought one of the Clickbank products I’m promoting.
Here are my stats so far:
Product 1: 20 impressions, 0 clicks.
Product 2: 4,960 impressions, 211 clicks, ad cost: 86.47, 1 sale (16.61)
Product 3: 14,410 impressions, 110 clicks, ad cost: 68.27, 0 sales
Product 4: 12,121 impresssions, 95 clicks, cost: 64.84, 1 sale (22.62)
So here’s the depressing summary:
I spent $219.58 to make $39.23.
Well, I say ‘make’ but that isn’t really even true. Clickbank has this policy that they won’t give you a dime of your commission until you get 4 or 5 different sales. They say it is because they want to make sure you aren’t just using your Clickbank account to buy products for yourself at a reduced rate, but I think that’s a bunch of bonk.
They could easily compare the name on the credit card or Paypal account with the name they’re sending checks to.
But anyway…I still have a couple of weeks to decide if I’m going to keep my Cash Detective membership. Unless I make a few hundred dollars **profit** in that time, it is extremely doubtful.
What I’m going to do next it try to figure out how to see what keyword my sale came from using the Google Cash Automator.
Addendum: Here’s an interesting fact about their forum. Now they have moderators approving every post before it shows up. If you write anything negative about the product, it doesn’t make it past the gatekeepers.
Here is a post I made in the forum in response to a poster who noticed the old posts are all missing.
My post:
The day the forum went down I had a sneaky suspicion that all the posts would mysteriously vanish. I really wonder if their ‘reason’ for taking down the forum was a farce and it was really to delete all the negative threads. Which is a bummer because I really did find some useful training info from fellow members.
==== Moderator’s Reply
"Hmmm. You are entitled to your opinion. But this sort of post will just cause negativity. It has been removed. If you don’t like our moderation, and you are unhappy with the way things are going, please open a support ticket and your concerns will be addressed.
We hired a person full time to manually cut and paste the best content from the old forums. This is an on-going process. It is real. I hurt my hand cutting and pasting over 90 entire posts. They are distributed around the forum.
The old forum broke, and we are now using a totally different piece of software now. It is much newer, and has been heavily customized. So – concerning your allegations that it “was a farce” - I would like to set the record straight with you, and I don’t think GCD staff should have to prove our claims in public, in an open debate.
Thanks,
Jonathan
P.S. – It is nothing personal, but I’m not all that keen to fight opinions, lies and allegations in the forums. The moderators have too many important tasks to attend to …"
It’s probably true that they really did have problems with the forum software, I’ll admit that. But censoring every post that is negative just doesn’t seem right.
In fact, someone started a thread that the Google Cash Detective posts should not have to pass through a moderator first. They said they haven’t seen any other forum that requires this, and since everyone on the forum is a paid member anyway, free speech should be allowed. After a few posts of people who agreed, the moderator posted the following. And then he locked the forum so no one else could comment on it:
"We understand all of the advantages, and the disadvantages to this approach. There are many other forums online, that offer an unmoderated, “free place” to learn and share. In our quest to offer the best information possible, we have decided to moderate each and every forum post at GCD. This decision will certainly irritate many of you, but we believe it’s for the best … We hope you will see the wisdom of this approach in the future, as our forum continues to grow with high quality content. The GCD forums will continue to be moderated."
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