Thursday, June 6, 2013

The saga of deception by freelancer.com continues - the reality of AFFILIATE program

Now it's about the affiliate program of freelancer.com. It has messed up the provisions of giving affiliate commissions to it's registered users. After buying out former getafreelancer.com it has changed it's affiliate program policy that hurts those who were referring users via the affiliate program. They neither put the notice about the change on affiliate page nor they informed the users who were registered from the getafreelancer.com days.

 A user who was registered in the affiliate program of the site stated that previously the affiliate earning was set to unlimited time period. It was the rule that was set during the getafreelancer.com era. Later when it was acquired by freelancer.com, the affiliate earning dropped significantly. From 2009 to 2011 he was in dark about the new rule. In 2011 when the earning fell near to zero, he started investigating.The user found out that the new rule is that the earning will be generated via affiliate program for only 90 days.

This change was kept as a secret buried in the new TOS. User who were already registered were not informed that their earning scope has been degraded from unlimited to 90 days only. The user also asserted that to avoid suspicion of the users due to rapid fall in affiliate earning, they slowly decreased the affiliate earning and later said that the earnings that were getting generated were simply due to a BUG!

The users says regarding this change in Freelancer.com affiliate earning-

The problem starts when the Mr. CEO tries to hide this change from its users. He wants users to think that they will be getting the commissions for Ever but in reality, it has been limited to only 3 months.

Why will they not include the 3 months limit info on the main affiliate page? Because they want to rip-off users more and more.

When I contacted their support, their cleverly sugar coated the situation via saying that they have not made any changes in their program since 2009 and then they removed that 3 months limit part from the affiliate page


Lesson for the new bees

After sharing the experience of a longtime user, here comes the advices that will enlighten the new bees who want to earn some money via freelancer.com affiliate. The burning question is that with the 90 days of limitation, can one really earn by referring a user?  If yes, then how much actually?

In expertscolumn a post has been published evaluating the referral program as actually a sheer waste of time pointing out the fact that if the refereed user earns nothing within the first 90 days, the referrer will end up in zero earning. How practical is it to expect that a new user will end up in completing projects that will earn some thing worth for the referrer? The writer pointed out these facts in article titled Freelancer.com Affiliate Network Program Review- Can you Really Make Money-

Anyone joining freelancer.com will at least take 1 week minimum to get used to the site usage unless you are already an expert. And then to post new projects or bid on the site will not be easy for a new comer. He will take minimum 6 months to get his reputation from the site and get good reviews which ultimately get you proper projects.

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