ReadBud Scam or Genuine?

ReaBud Scam

ReadBud is the new hot making money program which lots of people are talking about, especially those looking for work from home jobs, or so they say. Read on…

From the home user (readers) point of view the method ReadBud uses is simple! You get paid for reading and then rating articles. The payment varies based on the length of the article you read. It also comes with a referral program that pays you $5 per sign-up. The payment will be made via Paypal and the minimum limit is $50, and this is the catch.

Is ReadBud Legit and Paying or a Scam?

ReadBud is a relatively new site, created on 8th February 2010, so its only been online for a few months. Personally, I have not seen any payment proof yet, also there is no forum, which is often a sign of scam sites. Most legitimate work from home jobs will have work at home forum or work from home message board such as that at eMoneySpace (http://www.emoneyspace.com/forum/). The best word from home jobs always have these. So the outlook is not looking good.

My Experience of ReadBud

I signed up for the ReadBud program several months ago, believing it to be a scam. I generally follow the belief, “if it’s too good to be true, then it’s probably too good to be true”. What makes me think that this program might be a scam is the fact I just could not find a logical reason for them to make any money.

In the beginning I received about 10 articles per day to read, then after reaching $30 in earning this figure dropped to between 5 and 8 articles to read per day with one or two popup advertisements in with the articles. A very bad sign in my opinion. Which employer would deliberately give it’s employees, contractors, etc. advertisements with their work.

After reaching $40 the number of articles per day dropped to 2-3 articles with one of the articles immediately timing out or always, “no article found”. Also the number of popup windows increased considerably. This time the popups were also more insidious, trying to take over my system, some with no obvious way of closing them down. Another very bad sign is the popup adverts, remove the underlying “work”, i.e. the article I was supposed to be reading and rating.

Overall, it’s not looking good…

ReadBud Research

The number of people online at any one time looking for articles to read is usually between 10,000 and 15,000. That’s a lot of articles needed.

If you do a Google search on the title of the article you are reading, you will probably find the exact article was published many months ago (sometimes years ago). Most of the articles seem to be from sites such as eZineArticles. So how are ReadBud making money? These articles are FREE. These authors are NOT GOING TO PAY ReadBud for their research! This being the case, what’s the probability of ReadBud paying for our work?

Scamming ReadBud

Another problem for ReadBud is the problem of auto-reader-raters. It’s too easy for anyone with reasonable PHP knowledge to produce a script to automatically logon, get an article, wait a predetermined time determined by the length of the article and then rate the article. As far as I can see there is no checks in place to stop this.

The ReadBud Registration Details is as follows:

Now I must admit I got the impression this operation was being run from Australia, but the registration details are as follows:

• Registrant: Domains by Proxy, Inc., DomainsByProxy.com, 15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353, Scottsdale, Arizona 85260, United States
• Registered through: HostingDude.com, Domain Name: READBUD.COM, Created on: 08-Feb-10, Expires on: 08-Feb-11 ,Last Updated on: 23-Jun-10
• Administrative Contact: Private, Registration READBUD.COM@domainsbyproxy.com, Domains by Proxy, Inc., DomainsByProxy.com, 15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353, Scottsdale, Arizona 85260, United States, (480) 624-2599 Fax — (480) 624-2598
• Technical Contact: Private, Registration READBUD.COM@domainsbyproxy.com, Domains by Proxy, Inc. ,DomainsByProxy.com, 15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353, Scottsdale, Arizona 85260, United States, (480) 624-2599 Fax — (480) 624-2598

Please note: The owner of the domain name is specified in the “registrant” field. In most cases, the Registrar is not the owner of domain names listed in this database.

Conclusion

The earning rate is too high to be sustainable for this type of business with this type of security. It’s theoretically possible to make $5 per day. Before my final judgment I’ll wait for few more weeks to see if ReadBud pays or simply stops providing articles. But I suspect I will never see the $50.

Well, I hope you found something useful and enjoyed this article, please don’t forget to let me have your thoughts on this item. See you soon.