Bitcoin Forum

25% mandatory donation on withdrawals?   I spend .2btc advertising to make  .02btc   and if i withdraw you want a minimum of 25% WTF

What's coinurl?

EDIT: Reading up on it. Seems they advertise with "no fees" then levy fees nonetheless. Kinda like Bitcoin.

Hmm. Sounds like a dick move.

George Orwell just rolled over in his grave.

this is on the front page of the website

 It is absolutely free, you will receive 100% of the funds paid by advertisers!


.... except 25% we will take that from you for sure...sucker

Is it seriously mandatory?  This makes Operation Fabulous (http://operationfabulous.com) a little bit more fabulous.

You can wait 15 minutes and take 100% of you money, I think.

EDIT: Nope, I was wrong.

Answering the emails would make Operation Fabulous a little bit more fabulous for sure.

This indeed deserves the WTF that the thread title dishes out.

I just saw an operation fabulous ad on the coinurl faq.....whats going on here

That's BS Lurk. I don't know how it's set up, but could you just refuse to pay? Let's see what a judge thinks about their contract.

You srsly didn't knew what CoinURL was?

on the withdrawel screen i tried changing the automatic 25% to 0%   but it says it cannot be any lower than 25%   so if i want to withdraw anything that ive made...they take a quarter of it....christ

Nope. Why would I? I'm not a fan of ads. In fact I tend to block them.

From CoinURL FAQs

Is that even legal?

heres the e-mail response

CoinURL <info@coinurl.com>
   
12:47 PM (7 minutes ago)
      
to me
I cannot work in a loss. 25% is a reasonable commission I think. In comparison, Google AdSense charges 30-50% commissions.

Ok, I will change its name from "donation" to the "commission fee".

ಠ_ಠ Wow.

Should the fee's not somehow be implemented in to what he pays out?


kinda shitty thing to do IMO.

From the FAQ:


Sounds like a case for a scammer tag.

agreed

When I have introduced this commission fee, I updated "Withdraw" page but just forgot to update info on front page and FAQ.
I am really sorry for the inconvenience you have experienced. Now all docs updated.

CoinURL
   
1:26 PM (4 minutes ago)
      
to me
Oh sorry, I just forgot to update the page when introduced fee. Thank you for the bug report, now fixed.

In the ToS:
Commission fees
CoinURL reserve the right to charge any commission fee without notice to any user in its sole discretion.

P.S. May be you have heard "There are no free lunches", so don't be naive to think free services will be offered forever.
It was just a temporary promo campaign at the CoinURL launch when we charged no commissions, but now it expired.


thats great

So you now have this in your TOS:


I'm pretty sure that's not legal.

So now it doesn't say anything anywhere on your site to tell users that you charge a 25% withdrawal fee?  Nice, real classy...

greyhawk, This commission was introduced about a month ago and was shown on the "Withdraw" page as "compulsory donation". I never concealed it.

P.S. Now I explicitly named it "commission fee" and wrote about it on main page and FAQ. There is no more indefiniteness.

Well, at least they don't put you in a cage if you refuse to "donate".

I'm not talking about concealing things. I'm talking about this


aka "I can charge whomever I want whenever I want whatever the hell I want."

You can write that in your TOS all you want. Still won't make it legal.

What? Really nowhere?

http://coinurl.com/img/withdraw.png

you just added that ten minutes ago

I'm sorry, but I don't find the word "commission" anywhere on the front page or FAQ.

Nowhere that a user can see prior to signing up!  Again, real classy.

You need to tell people your fees UP FRONT BEFORE they sign up.

Jesus Christ, this is getting worse every minute.


What the hell, son?

This whole disaster is a lesson in how not to generate trust in your users and consumers.

Just updated FAQ:

It is absolutely legal and is a common business practice used by major ad networks. Read Google AdSense ToS:
https://www.google.com/adsense/localized-terms

This is just a legal thing to protect against lawsuits in case of some catastrophic event. Under normal conditions it will never happen, down worry! Many companies include "No warranty" clause in their ToS, it is a common business practice.

So say I deposit X Bitcoins, and somewhere down the road, I cancel my ad campaign with only a small fraction of that lost. So you're saying, you guarantee me %25 percent loss on any funds I actually want back?

you cant withdraw your deposits...only your earnings.....minus 25%

Managing CPC advertising network requires a lot of work due to various methods of cheating from publishers and consumes a lot of server resources for the targeting options. Therefore it is just IMPOSSIBLE to provide service like CoinURL (or any other AdSense analog) without commission fees. If you want lower commission fees just choose pay-per-day model like Operation Fabulous offer, it can work on very tiny commission.

Even better! That way there's no way for me to decide to move my campaign to a competitor!


Sounds good ::) OpFab here I come! I understand you need some commissions, but %25 sounds pretty ridiculous for a Bitcoin-based service. Sorry ::)

I'm switching also

Imma charging everyone who reads this post a 0.1 BTC fee for, you know, maintainance and stuff.

If you don't want to pay the fee, you shouldn't have read the post.

Now hop to it, adress is in the sig.

Of course you cannot do that, just think about the referral commissions.

Stop being a douche, not everything about CoinURL is bad, in fact, the only complain I have with them is that 25% fee.
Have you actually tried their service? Or are you just going with the wave?


You actually started with helpful comments but now you're just acting like a troll.

That's a start, thank you!

Thank you for your remittance.  :)

I see you just don't understand how many efforts is required to operate CPC ad network and how much does servers and electricity cost! If you don't satisfied with CoinURL's 25% commission, try AdSense with 50%.

BTW, I try to offer as lower commission as I can. I think 25% is the lowest on the CPC ad market.

I have used their service. I never had much traffic, so I only got a few mBTC, so the fee made that tiny amount even less. And after rereading the withdrawal page again, I was reminded by the text at the bottom of the page that deposited funds can't be withdrawn because of AML. So I more or less retract my post. I still disagree with his nonadjustable fee after his previously fee-free architecture. I'd be okay with %10, but %25 seems a little ridiculous to me.

I'm inclined to agree, but I'm not entirely sure there's grounds for it, because I have no verifiable proof that said clause is illegal.

caffeinewriter and others: I decided to set commission fee to 0% for the small withdrawals in total amount below 0.1 BTC per month.

Suggest your variant how to write this clause in ToS...

P.S. I just don't understand why some people in this thread are so angry on this commission! I can set it to zero, but next month CoinURL will be offline due to unpaid hosting bill. Do you want this? Or do you think all is free?

Now that's actually quite fantastic :) That's the kind of thing that makes me inclined to donate on my own.

I'm going to be 100% honest. After pondering this for a minute and talking with somebody who managed to open my eyes some, why are we all pissed off? The only difference between the fee and what other ad networks do is this fee is visible to the end-user, unlike others which take the cut behind the scenes. So I'm still standing by my stance that %25 is too high, but we may be overreacting a little.


As much as I'd like to jump right in and say "hell yeah", without ads, the internet would be dead. It costs money to run the internet, and ads generate money, and make it easier for us, the end user, to use.

I don't think anyone wants this, but it's the fact that you were being so secretive about these fees that made everyone angry.

- By the sound of it, you didn't notify current users of the service that you were now charging a commission fee on withdrawals.
- You didn't have the commission fee displayed anywhere that would be accessible to someone who had not yet signed up.
- You had text/advertising up that stated it was a fee-free service, and that the users would receive 100% of the funds, which wasn't true.

If you had been more up-front about the fees, I think people would have been much more understanding.

No, that's actually what ad networks want you to believe. Without ad networks to drip-drop-drip cents into websites we would already have decent micropayment systems for web services, like we should have had a bazillion years ago. The absurd "everything is free, lol" mentality would never had the chance to infect a whole generation, it there was a system where say reading an article on the web costs 0,1 cents with an easy transparent per-use payment resolvement.

Alas, I fear it is too late now. Ad networks already have destroyed any chance of that.

*shrugs* makes sense.

I'd rather see ads on my screen than pay to view articles, even if it is a tiny amount.  I think most people feel the same way, which is why ads, not micropayments, became the dominant method of revenue on content-publishing sites.

It's all about it feeling free, not it necessarily being free.

Exactly.  Making any payment whatsoever, even a very small amount, would make many people feel subconsciously guilty about aimlessly browsing the web.

There was a live example of the system with "pay for every move" and without ads. It was a predecessor of the Internet, widespread in France in the 80s-90s - Minitel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel). As you could guess, this model lost a competition to the Internet with free ad-sponsored sites.

EDIT: nvm, this has gone off-topic.

Minitel and BTX lost more for technical reasons because they refused to adapt and go away from their character based systems and "page numbers"/menus towards supporting easily navigateable interlinked GUIs like Netscape could provide. This is also what killed off Gopher and Veronica. BTX and Minitel eventually finally switched, though at that time it was already far too late and the implementation was horrible.

I admit, it was my fault to not to update the main page and FAQ. This fee was introduced about a month ago, I updated withdrawal page and just forgot to change other docs. There were no complaints about this mismatch, so I found a bug only today when the issue emerged. As I said earlied, now all documentation is updated and all users will be aware of this fee.

So you're saying my preference is wrong?   ::)

I say I want to support the sites I visit, so I will not do that.  If I prefer to see ads instead of make micropayments to view webpages, that is my prerogative.

Been there, done that. To support sites I like, I leave a single ad unblocked in an unobtrusive place, and should it interest me, click on it.

Because of people like you, some website owners started to hide site's content from the users with AdBlock installed.

If you have any issue with Operation Fabulous please PM me or Edd or email me at operationfabulous@bitcointrading.com, I wasn't aware that there were any emails going anywhere?  I wish I had emails sent to me from the site, I am trying to revolutionize the site but I keep running into walls, and I keep hiring people to give the site a make-over but it never works out.  Hopefully early 2013 OpFab 2.0 will be released, until then, at least the site works. 

http://opfab.net/contact-us/ (http://opfab.net/contact-us/)