My family and I took a nice long vacation to the lake, and hooboy did I come back to a lot of news! So let's get right to it.

SeaTurtlesPTR - Sea Turtles PTR used to be my favorite PTR. There were tons of decent value links and I could easily make 20 cents or more daily. That ended when the site owner (Kris) introduced points, which could be redeemed for advertising only. The ads did result in pretty good hits to my PTP links though, so it wasn't all bad. But now the real blow has come: at some point while I was gone the site went down, and it now appears that it could be several weeks or even months before it will be brought back up again. Kris has had several problems in the past with the site registration due to the fact that she didn't actually own it, and it appears to have come to a head. She's also quickly gaining a reputation in the PTR world for aiding and abetting unscrupulous site owners. Bottom line for me is this is a site owner I no longer trust. I'm very disappointed and sad to see a once great site go down the drain like this. For more information, here is the blog post that Kris made on the subject.

Bang the Links (BTL): BTL has been slowly dying ever since the new owner - Sherise, also owner of School Bus of Cash and Princess Mails - took over. For those who weren't around when it happened, the old owner (Tabatha) basically bailed ship, giving the site to Sherise with virtually no warning to her members. Many quit at that point, but many more stuck around to give the new owner a chance to prove herself. Unfortunately it looks like the new owner failed and this site is about to bite the dust. Sherise is way behind on payments, has almost completely stopped processing ads, and as of today accessing the web site delivers the message "Hosting Account For This Domain Has Been Suspended". This site had a wonderful reputation for years. It's amazing how quickly a good site can die at the hands of negligent owners. I'm hesitant to quit outright since I have over $9 in earnings waiting for payout, but I'm realistic too and doubt I'll ever see that money. Sigh. I'm just thankful I never invested in this site. For the whole story of Bang the Links' demise, there's a very long thread on the Global Friends Online board.

BuxWiz: BuxWiz recently announced that they have cut direct referral earnings almost in half. Standards and Wizards will now only earn 0.3 cent per click (vs the former 0.5 cent), Magicians only 0.5 cent (vs the old one cent), etc. This only affects direct referrals, not rented.

Freebies-N-More: This site has always been unsustainable, and was apparently set up that way as a sort of advertisement for another site owned by the same woman (a site selling PTR/PTC scripts). Despite the fact that she knowingly set up an unsustainable site, the owner has seen fit to whine and moan to her members on several occasions that she's in the hole and getting deeper, and blaiming her members for that fact. She also has told her member base recently that unless the site starts making money, no one will be paid. Since the site is completely unsustainable and will always be unless she makes some huge changes, I guess no one's going to get paid. I highly recommend staying far away from this site. Even if it does somehow manage to start making money, this is obviously an untrustworthy person who has no business owning a PTR site.

ShareAdSpace (SAS): SAS has been pausing sites left and right lately due to some bad ads running in third party banners. Some of the ads are running autosearches which, besides being against the policy of the search providers, can completely lock up your computer. The bad ads can also have viruses and other nasty stuff. Unfortunately some site owners simply don't care, and others have no idea what's going on or how to fix it, so I have a feeing some of them will remain paused (and possibly get banned at other sites) for the foreseeable future. What's frightening is that SAS is one of the only sites currently making a strong stand against this sort of thing, and many owners are just looking the other way. SAS is taking a lot of flack for it, but I think it's a case of shooting the messenger. It's becoming increasingly difficult to find a "safe" PTR site, where you can be reasonably sure your computer won't be attacked left and right. I did read somewhere that for some reason July and August are the worst times for these type of ads being sent out by the third party advertisers. I have no idea why, but hopefully this means things will improve next month. I have a long list of sites in my Ad-Block Plus add-on, but I still find some sites locking me up. It's aggravating.

E-Qoo2: E-Q002 recently stopped allowing multiclicking (which is where you can click several ads at once without having to wait for a timer). Now there's a timer on each ad which must run out before you can click the next ad. I'm not sure if an admin message was sent out about this change; I may have missed it while I was on vacation. As a clicker I'm not too thrilled about it, but as an advertiser I love it! Since we make no money if the advertisers aren't happy, overall I think this is a positive thing. Over half the PTR sites I belong to use this system, so it seems to be becoming the norm. The other site owned by Esperanza - OurPTR2 - uses the same system, and as far as I know always has.

Phew, I think that's all my fingers can type for now. I'm sure there's more but it can wait for another post. Hope you're all having a beautiful end of August!