Bidvertiser Review - Why Bidvertiser is a scam? Experience as a publisher & advertiser

I feel so cheated and am so pissed off with Bidvertiser right now. But all I can do is write a post to alert all further Bidvertiser publishers and advertisers. Are you thinking of displaying Bidvertiser ads on your website or blog? Or worse, are you planning to advertise with Bidvertiser and give them your credit card information? I had a really bad experience with them, and even if it does not repeat with you, I think you should read this entire post so that you can take an informed decision about Bidvertiser.

About two weeks ago, I have signed up with Bidvertiser, both as a Publisher as well as an Advertiser.

When I signed up with Bidvertiser as a publisher, I was encouraged by their simple sign up and quick start system. I placed Bidvertiser ads very near to the content (top right corner) and after seeing that some of the ads that were displayed were almost $7 per click ads I got really excited. Ya, $7 per click ads. Not a single Google Adsense ad of mine has earned me more than that. In any case, I was receiving around 3000 page impressions per day. I kept the ad for around 10 days in a position where any other ad has given me a decent CTR. But with Bidvertiser I did not recieve a single click after 30,000 impressions. I tried changing positions of the ads, putting them in other crucial places, but no. Well, if a advertising system is inefficient, it is not fair to call it a scam. So what if their ads did not make me a penny or if Bidvertiser CTR is almost close to zero. This is not the main reason why I call Bidvertiser a Fraud. After all any fraud they do with publishers, will never be noticed by publishers. This is why even if you are not planning to advertiser with Bidvertiser, you should read my advertiser experience below.

I decided to advertise some of my referral links using Bidvertiser, especially because Bidvertiser had announced a new incentive - $20 in free clicks for new advertisers who sign up. I signed up for free clicks, I was made to enter my credit card information before I got the benefit of their offer.

The following are the main points why I am so pissed off with Bidvertiser.

1. Once you enter your credit card information you are not given the option to delete your credit card.
   
2. Your credit card will be automatically billed, without you noticing it. I was shocked to see my credit card billed for $56 even before I directly authorized any such transaction. Maybe I was not careful to read their Terms and Conditions, but lesson learnt: Even after reading this post if you want to join Bidvertiser, read every word of their Terms and Conditions.
   
3. After seeing that I was automatically billed, i tried to search payment and billing information where I could cancel their automatic billing preferences. There was no option to cancel or suspend my credit card billing in future. All they gave me was options to bill my credit card monthly or weekly for different amounts.
   
4. As a result I closed my account. I was not sent any email after my account was closed nor was any message communicated to me about what will happen to the remaining balance in my account. This is why I think Bidvertiser is a complete fraud.

Here are some more points which display the inherent tendency of Bidvertiser to cheat their clients and I would guess even publishers. This is the experience I had while I created some ads on Bidvertiser and ran them for a week.

1. The following sentence is copy pasted from Bidvertiser homepage at the time of writing this blog post.

   Easily create and edit your ads and target URL. Simply choose a title, two lines of a description and you are set to go. Your ads will appear in the categories you have chosen within minutes.

   But the actual fact : Bidvertiser takes about two days to review your ad and only then does your ad starts running. What they claim above is a blatant lie !
   
2. It is not made clear to you that your ads will also run on 'their search engine partners'. You are never told who these partners are. Only when you create an ad, start running it, and then create on edit ad you will see that this is the case (if you are careful enough to read the page carefully).
   

The Bottom Line ..

Whether you are a publisher or an advertiser, it is very hard to trust Bidvertiser. After all, they are the ones who count your clicks and pay you. I would not be surprised if they show different number of clicks to their advertisers and lesser clicks to their publishers.

update: I think this review would be unfair and incomplete without mentioning this development. Bidvertiser had deducted $56 from my credit card automatically. Before I noticed $16 was gone, so $40 remained. I immediately closed my account and Bidvertiser at least had the decency to refund my balance. It would be fair to accept that I could have paused my ads and avoided the $56 charge. So I have no proof for scam or fraud claim and the above post should be thought of as a biased review. However, there is certainly some transparency missing and I still advise you to be on your toes when dealing with Bidvertiser.