What is Sustainability?

Sustainability refers to the ability of a get-paid site to generate enough income from the sale of each advertisement to pay the amount it is promising to pay its members.

Why is Sustainability a problem?

There are many get-paid sites online at the moment offering large sums of money for reading e-mails and clicking advertisements. You may have seen examples of this kind of site, offering $10+ per paid email. However, these sites are often the sites which charge the least to their advertisers for advertisements. The effect of this is that these get-paid sites are taking in less money than they are promising to pay out to their members; in other words the sites are unsustainable. Being unsustainable makes it extremely unlikely, if not impossible, for these sites to pay their members as promised, and so they are likely to be scams.

How can I find out if a site is sustainable?

The simplest method of finding out if a site is likely to be able to pay is to check whether they are charging sustainable ad prices - in other words the ad price covers the cost of paying the members who click the ad.

On most get-paid sites there is an advertising page link, where ad buyers can see a list of ads available and the prices to buy them. Some ads may be guaranteed click purchases, eg a paid to click ad for 1000 clicks. Other ads may be ads "to all members", where there is no guarantee how many members will actually click the link. When you use the Sustainability Calculator, in the Ad Quantity field you can type in either the number of clicks an ad is sold for, or, for an ad "to all members", the total number of members at the site.

To fill in the Payment Per Click field, type in the value of the ad in currency format. For example 1 cent would be 0.01, or one tenth of a cent would be 0.001. If you have trouble working out the right amount to put here, please refer to our Payment Per Click Table below.

The click through rate on a guaranteed click ad will always be 100% (so you can type 100 in the Click Through Rate field). If the ad is "to all members", the percentage may vary from as little as 10% to as high as 50%. You may wish to try several different numbers to see if they affect the result.

Additionally, many sites offer referral bonuses, where you earn a percentage when your referral clicks a link. For example, if a site offers three referral levels of ten per cent, five per cent and 2 per cent, add all of these together to reach the total to fill in the Referral Percentage Total field, eg ten + five + two = 17%.

You can now calculate the total cost of the ad to the get-paid site. If the figure is substantially higher than the price on the site's advertising page the site may not be sustainable. If the figure is the same or lower than the price on the site's advertising page you will have a better chance of receiving payment, as the site is likely to be sustainable. It is important to note that a sustainable program is not a guarantee that you will be paid, since sites may have many other problems which you should be aware of. However, it does serve as a useful indicator as to how likely a site is to pay.