Be Careful You Don’t Get Cut by Bleeding-Edge Technology!

I’ve always known that if you are going to get in on the bleeding-edge of something, there’s a high chance you’re going to get bit. As a computer repair tech, I’ve always advised against going with the latest and greatest of anything until at least 6 months into the existence of the thing so as to allow for any major bugs to be worked out of the system, required initial patches rolled into the product, etc. People who have ignored that advice often speak of trouble connecting to peripherals, or losing data, or suddenly can’t use a favourite program or some other productivity-halting complaint. It might be the latest smartphone, the latest OS upgrade, a new laptop with an unfamiliar operating system, etc.

Most of the time I am pretty good about abiding by my own advice. Partly due to household finances, but largely due to my general aversion to risk-taking and wanting to be sure that any move forward is always sure-footed. I like to know what I’m getting myself into before I go there, and that it is largely stable. But in the Fall of 2019, I found myself joining beta-testing for three different online initiatives. Of those three, one got me so frustrated I nearly gave up on it. The bulk of that frustration dealt with the lack of a support system outside of purely video content. I don’t watch TV. I rarely go to the movies. I rarely throw in a DVD at home, as in perhaps once a year, sometimes not even that. If I watch anything on YouTube, it won’t be because I went to the site to watch something on purpose. It will generally be because I was on another site with a video embedded, such as Facebook, the local news website, the national news website, etc. I don’t even watch the news online, I read it. Videos on these particular sites are often the cute kind that I watch, dolphins using a puffer fish as a ball to play with, cats curling up under a dog’s nose, a 3yr old drumming with an orchestra, that kind of thing. So yeah, the fact that one of these three sites was so heavily loaded down with nothing but video content in their help area nearly sent me packing when I really, really, really needed some informational tidbits and couldn’t find them anywhere in text! Did I feel bit??? You better believe I did! Now I’m pretty good at figuring my way around things. I teach people to give themselves self-guided tours of websites they wish to use before they actually use it, so they learn where everything is and what it does. Eventually I figured out what I needed to do, and eventually found help files for the second half of a very important task. But I had such a bad taste in my mouth with the lack of readable assistance that I very nearly hung up on this one.

The first beta test I joined back in the Fall, was for a new social network called Webtalk. Webtalk is kind of a coded-from-the-ground-up mash-up between LinkedIn and Facebook, with a touch of Slack thrown in for good measure. Being a beta-tester there meant occasionally reporting bugs or unexpectedly-missing features to the official business page on Facebook. There is still one feature missing that I am hoping they will implement, but the last time I inquired, other things were taking priority over that one. They are hoping to come out of beta soon, the original date being sometime in March of 2019. Joining is by invitation only until they come out of beta. Users of this social network will be able to earn from ads viewed while sharing data, they will be able to maintain both personal and professional contact lists, sort those lists when creating new posts, and more. The timeline and list of future features is long and some are even patent-pending.

AdFeedz Profile BannerThe second beta test I joined was over at AdFeedz. Similar to InfinityTrafficBoost, InfinityMailerBoost, AdBTC, and EasyHits4U, AdFeedz is all these things rolled into one with 6 ways to earn an income while advertising your own site(s). I’ve been paid once by these guys already, and we’ll see how long it takes for the second payment to accumulate.

hashing adspaceThe third beta test I joined, and the one that very nearly sent me packing, is Hashing Ad Space. This site mashes together advertising earnings with minting a cryptocurrency called Asimi. Asimi trades on the Wave DEX, and the last time I looked, it was around $2.50+ give or take. You can check the DEX to see where it’s trading now. As a beta tester, I got in on minting Asimi by viewing ads, for free. I was also able to become a sales affiliate for free as well. Asimi earned during the beta period could not be cashed out, so I used it to claim an Asimi stake. Staking Asimi decides how many ads you can view per day, as well as roughly how many Asimi you’ll earn per day based on those ad views. For 24 days after Hashing Ad Space left beta testing and went live, I was earning from 2 ad views each day, one being the free stake while in beta, the other being the stake I purchased with the Asimi I’d earned during beta.

Compared to other advertising sites listed so far, viewing a single ad on Hashing Ad Space earns much faster, because you aren’t “earning” per se, you are “minting”. Because Asimi is an in-house token for H.A.S., it isn’t useful to you until you exchange it on the Wave DEX into a currency you can use elsewhere. The value of Asimi therefore, is stated either in BTC on your HAS dashboard, or in USD in your HAS wallet. The Wave DEX lets you sell your Asimi for any other type of coin or token however, so you can view the index to see what a single Asimi is going for in whatever currency you prefer.

The day came near the end of February when I wanted to do a test of the cashout system. I hadn’t had a chance to do this during beta, so it took the period of having 2 ad views per day before I could test this feature. This was where I ran into the lack of anything written down that I couldn’t quickly figure out on my own. Two days later, and a fair bit of frustrated correspondence with my upline, I finally got the withdrawal made into the Wave DEX, the exchange done into BTC, and the BTC sent to the wallet I prefer to use (because it earns me interest). During this time, I was so certain I was ready to throw in the towel, that I didn’t mint for a day. I thought it was a couple days, but my graph only shows one day’s minting missing during that troublesome few days.

A few days after that scenario, word came down from the site owner that a support system was in the works and should launch Monday March 4th. Monday was a busy flurry of household activity so I didn’t get a chance to check for the new support system until today, March 5th. HAS has set themselves up with Zendesk, and have a very nice text-based support system now! Plenty of graphics are included to guide people along who need a more visual cue added to the text. This means that those who prefer to watch videos can. Those who prefer to read can, and those who need the instructional screenshots, can have those too.

Whew!!! Oh my word! This computer repair support tech can finally tell you about a system that finally has decent support built into it! There is one benefit to me getting bit by that problem instead of you. While I had to proverbially apply bandaids to the cuts sustained on the bleeding edge of this particular bit of technology, you don’t have to. Barging trails as a kid meant I got the thorns in my sleeves while those behind received fewer to none of them. The same applies here.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t give you this breakthrough until AFTER HAS left beta. This means if you want to join me in minting Asimi with just a few ads per day, you need to purchase Asimi stakes using your own money to begin with. You’ll need a Wave DEX account, install the desktop app so you have access to the support website from the info area under the gear in case you need assistance using the interface, and you’ll need to fund your country’s currency into that asset in your Wave account. From there you can buy a Wave token or two to handle Wave transactions. After that, you can trade for enough Asimi to purchase one or more Asimi stakes. Each stake right now is just under 56 Asimi. When you create your HAS account and click on Asimi Stake, you will get a more exact count of how many Asimi you need to purchase for one stake. Go back to your Wave account and trade for that amount. Return to your HAS wallet and fund it with your Asimi from Wave. Go to the Asimi Stake tab and purchase the stake(s) you want.

After those steps are completed however, you can put a plan together that has the potential to earn you a decent income minting Ads on HAS. The best part of your plan will include the fact that your initial out-of-pocket expense has been reduced to mere transaction fees now over at Wave, and no further fiat currency needs to be used going forward. In fact, further Wave tokens can now be purchased with Asimi, just be sure you still have Wave token bits available to handle the transaction fee for that.

My own plan is to earn enough for another stake and purchase that, then earn enough for minimum cashout. Then earn enough for a third stake, then earn enough for minimum cashout. I plan to repeat this cycle until I am earning roughly $100 USD per day in Asimi, and depending on how things are going at that time, I may continue the “purchase, then cash out” cycle. There is a contest going right now for anyone who can get themselves up to 25 Asimi Stakes. The first group to get there will win the contest. If you are reading this later in the year, that contest may be over by now. You’ll have to check if other contests are going.

As noted earlier, I generally don’t get into bleeding-edge situations, but I did with this one. I think if support stayed solely with nothing but video content, I would have had strong thoughts about walking away, because I can’t promote something I can’t support. Either that, or I would have begun doing what my upline was doing, which was writing out his own written help files.

What I can say about Hashing AdSpace, is that they are definitely paying. They deliver what they say they will, and I have my payment proof to prove it. Stars denote dates and times, and where the Wave title is on the dark theme of the desktop app. Now that I have a better idea of what I’m doing when it comes to cashing out, those dates and times should be closer together in the future.

hashing adspace payment proof

Tis the Season for Payouts! While Others Pay, I AM Paid!

Tell someone that you are getting paid to view advertisements and they look at you strange!  You know, like you should go back to that hole you crawled out of, take another nap, and perhaps wake up a “normal” person again.  Many of these same people however, will pay without thinking twice to see ads on TV and in their favourite newspaper or magazine.  If their favourite newspaper or magazine went online and installed a paywall, they gladly pay for continued access to their preferred publication, ads and all.

These same people take part in social networks, forums, and other online social sites where advertisers make money from targeting users by how they interact on the site.  Do the users ever see a dime of that money?  Do they ever get compensated for contributing to the demographic data that got the advertiser their sale??? NO!  But they will waste no time scoffing at anyone who thinks they can cash in on the bounty.

Well, I wanted to give an update on the income trickle I have going all by my little self right now.  That’s another thing people scoff at, and I have to admit, at one time I was in this group of scoffers myself.  The real estate franchise owner would make no money if realtors, who get paid commission only, weren’t selling houses.  The owner of the car dealership would make no money if his salesmen, who are only paid commission, weren’t selling cars.  Your local grocery store would not make any sales if they didn’t have staff opening doors, stocking shelves, and customers buying during business hours.  I actually saw someone scoff that the only way money was being made in one company was because of relying on others to make sales. . . Hmmm. . . run that by me again???

You see, advertisers are businesses, corporations, non=profit organizations, causes, cottage industry and home-based businesses all trying to reach those who want their offerings.  They are taught in marketing courses to go where their target market hangs out and purchase advertising there.  The concept of banner advertising on traditional-styled websites is just so much noise now on the page.  People don’t complain about it unless it gets too “in their face”, but neither do they interact much unless the ad is touting something they were searching for on Google Amazon or Facebook just minutes or hours earlier.  This type of ad-tracking is done via cookies.

So if banner advertising has become so ubiquitous that people don’t pay it much mind anymore, how else do they get word out about their offering?  They turn to online versions of old offline standby’s.  The unaddressed ad mail that now tends to hit the recycling bin before it hits the house has been respawned online as the safelist/viral mailer.  The difference?  People actually sign up to receive these emails so that they in turn can send out emails of their own.  It’s a captive audience, although similar to unaddressed ad mail, if your subject line fails to grab attention, it can be good money after bad if you purchased an ad pack to do the sending.

But the thing is, people DO buy these ad packages.  The visual noise of ads in the magazine has respawned online in the form of traffic exchanges where people choose to sign up to view these ads in exchange for their own ad being viewed by others.  It’s a bit of a “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”.  Again, ad packages can be purchased and such packages are advantageous to those who don’t have time to sit there scrolling through ad after ad to earn the credits to send out their message.

The theme across all these various advertising iterations, is the concept of real human beings.  Google has occasionally suffered terrible bouts of click-fraud on the adword ads on their search engine.  Safelist/viral mailers and Traffic exchanges suffer from programmed bots to do the clicking for people as well, but captchas are put in place to reduce the abuse of the system, making it quite viable for most people using these services.

When an ad or an email crosses a person’s desk who happens to be looking for the product being offered, that advertiser has gained a customer.  They’ve made a sale.  There are literally 100’s of these sites around the ‘net, and most of them are similar to your offline advertising in that they don’t pay anyone for the time they spend viewing or sending their advertising.

I am happy to say however, that sites are coming along who pay you for the ads you click and the emails you open.  Even browsers are starting to get in on the act with paying you for your time by installing tiny miners to make your device pay for itself finally.

One of the sites where I click ads to earn a penny or two, is BTCClicks:

2019-01-24 payment proof BTCClicks

BTCClicks pays a certain number of satoshi with every ad you click.  Most of the time this earns you at least 100 satoshi per day, with payout at 10,000 satoshi.  As you can see in the screenshot to the left here, BTCClicks has paid me a number of times now.  The ads I click are paid for by other members who have bought ad packages at BTCClicks.  As a free surfer, I get paid to view those ads.

 

coinbulb payment proofsCoinbulb is similar to BTCClicks, but up until Fall 2018, they had fewer ads on their system.  Their ads were generally higher-paying, but because they were fewer, it took a long time to get my first payout.  Since Fall 2018 however, they’ve added to their site and you’ll notice the second payout came much faster!

A traffic exchange I joined in August 2017, InfinityTrafficBoost, has paid me three times now as of February 2019.  They offer 11 different ad packages aimed at the desired number of views an advertiser wants for their product or service.  Payouts for them seem to be getting closer together as well.  Click the link above to see three different payout screenshots.

bitter.io 2 payment proof

Similar to BTCClicks and Coinbulb, Bitter.io came on the scene offering a plugin for your browser that would let you earn by surfing ads on their site.  They’ve paid me twice so far, and probably would have paid me again already if I was more dedicated to clicking the ads in their list.

I am doing a fair bit of my earned ad viewing now on a browser that honestly makes my 12yr old system work so much faster online!  That browser is CryptoTabBrowser, and it is a version of Chrome that has been optimized to be up to 8x 10x faster (as of April 2019) than Chrome itself while also mining in an open tab on your computer, using CPU power rather than the GPU resources typically used by mining farms.  CryptoTabBrowser’s cashout is at a mere 1000 satoshi, and so far takes not quite two months is speeding up as they make improvements as you’ll see in this screenshot.

I’ve been paid once so far from AdFeedz, and thanks to getting in while it was free to do so, I’ve been paid once by HashingAdSpace too, just waiting on that payment to go through as I type this. HashingAdSpace breaks the train in this thread, as going forward as of March 1/19, no one earns for free, you have to buy ad stakes to do any earning. EDIT:  Currently, a single Asimi stake will cost roughly $125 USD as of March 4/19.  However, that stakes lasts a year, and your funds will be “earned back” 6 months or less, depending on how your daily ad minting goes, and whether or not you reinvest your earned Asimi to earn funds faster.

It’s been a great week starting the beginning of March 2019, as several of these payment proofs show cashouts all since the previous week.  My wallet over at Freebitco.in is seeing regular increases in the daily interest my balance is accumulating!  If you need a legitimate BTC wallet that honestly earns you interest, head over to Freebitco and get your deposit address.  Put that address into every payment system you get cashouts from and after you’ve accumulated 30,000 satoshi, you’ll start to see interest accrue.  No need to play any of the games there or even to use the faucet on the main page.  Just use the wallet for your sending and receiving.  When you need to spend your BTC, check out this incomplete list for ways you can use your cryptocurrency as currency!

I spend anywhere from 2 to 4hrs per day at these sites, pairing the free-to-surf sites with non-earning advertising sites so that my time spent advertising my business and such is earned by other sites that pay me.  Imagine what those payment proofs would look like if my scoffers were workers instead?