About three years ago I got an email from a representative of 'study bay' offering to pay me $800 straight into my PayPal account if I agreed to host a pop up widget on my main blog, over at ReviseSociology.com
Initially I thought this might be a scam, as this firmly fell right into the 'too good to be true' category of offers.
However, I did some digging and it all seemed to be legitimate, if not entirely ethical.
You see my web site is for A-level sociology students (16-19 education) and Study Bay, well that's a site where you can pay to get essays written for you, and the pop up they wanted me to install sends you to that site, and I get a cut.
Given that I got the message in July, a slow month on my blog as the exams finish by mid June and summer holidays are just starting, I thought 'why not give it a go' - and within a couple hours of agreeing I had that $800, so I installed the widget.
I didn't get too many conversions in the first month, but they agreed to pay me another $400 into PayPal to keep it up for a second month, and by that point I was getting a few conversions.
However, I decided to take it down from October, it seemed a bit of a conflict with my site, although TBH A-level sociology is 100% examined so there's nothing to be gained from paying for an essay anyway, there's no way it's going to count towards a final grade.
I had planned not to put the widget back up, but with Covid leading to exams being cancelled I reinstalled it to mitigate my lost income from blogging revenue (I sell resources) and since then it's done quite nicely bringing me in several hundred dollars a month!
So much so that I've just updated a few links and put in some more banners to see if I can up my revenue further. Such as these....
I'll have to keep an eye on the traffic to my blog, I am very cautious about SEO penalties - so I've only put in three additional links for now.
To my mind this all worth it - a few minutes work NOW will pay off within one month even if that increases my revenue only by 1-2%.
And I say it's unethical, but....
- Paying for an essay for A-level sociology is of no benefit given the 100% assessment by exam, so there's no distortion of results within my direct main market
- Education is a market - in the UK at least rich parents hot house their kids into the best schools by paying private tutors, if that's legal, I've got no problem with this, it's only different by degree, not in essence to wealth impacting education already!
And it's VERY postmodern, too! Which appeals.