Hell they (ppcs) are probably running some of those PTR sites!
I can name several PTR owners who own search engines and I think one or two are listed in Øystein’s article, so yes, you’re correct in that.
This summer we went through a spate where a whole bunch of insane PTRs opened up that could not possibly pay their members with the prices they were selling ads for – so they didn’t, they just shut down leaving the clickers high and dry – I guess the theory being if you’re gonna screw the SE advertisers, why not screw the people clicking up the money for you too? Grrr. That makes me angry too, cos a lot of these folks are disabled, pensioners, unemployed – they’re clicking for fractions of pennies if they get paid at all, and the PTR owners and SE affs are getting rich off of them too. And a lot of the clickers really don’t realise how the ‘food chain’ works, so to speak. Some do, yes, but the vast majority have no idea.
But…these sham PTR proggies made tens, more likely hundreds of thousands, by sending out one search advert after another to memberships averaging 10 – 15,000 – say 200 search adverts a day for an average proggie lifespan of three months.
There are several hosting companies that host both the PTRs and the SEs, and also own SEs. Lachlann McGregor owns Hosting2NV (hosting company), as well as owning SearchDrifter (search engine). Hosting2NV is a big provider of hosting for both PTRs and SEs. Lucidity Hosting is set up in a similar way, and I believe they own a search engine but I can’t remember which one.
Then there are services like:
http://www.getaportal.com
http://www.getportals.com
To see what’s really going on at that second one, hit:
http://www.getportals.com/en.htm
Not to mention that some of the search affiliates, whilst not owning PTRs themselves, get literally hundreds of members in their downlines at both the search engines and the PTRs. When Øystein and I ran the numbers, we both almost fainted. It’s low-balled in the report, but these people are raking in anywhere from $100k to up to $750k a month.
Some of that didn’t come to light til after the original report was done – this thing seems like – the more you investigate, the worse it all gets.
Yup – it really is that rotten.