Saturday, June 03, 2006

WiredSurf Going Down?

Bad news coming from WiredSurf, will it going down soon? See news:
We understand that people are interested in receiving their payment as quickly as possible and in a day and age where instant gratification has become the norm, it is understandable that the wait times for payments has changed along with the new trends in the industry. Was what acceptable wait-times in the past are now considered 'excessive'.

However, sometimes the time in which your payment is pending can make all the difference in the world.

In order for an auto surf program to be long-lasting is for them to generate multiple streams of revenue from outside of the surf program itself. Sure you've all heard this many times before but if you probably knew how few auto surf programs actually focus on outside revenue pools and instead rely exclusively on new member upgrades and 'fund circulation', you may be absolutely shocked.

The fortunate thing for these auto surf programs is as long as new member activity flourishes, they are rarely required to prove their abilities to generate and create revenue outside of the program.

When EMO retained over $80,000.00 of our funds, we were one of the few who stepped up and instead of penalizing members by requiring that they wait for their payment, we paid out from our revenue reserve pool. In fact, members weren't affected at all by the activities of EMO in conjunction with their previous Wired Surf upgrades and ad purchases. If we had of been in the industry when Stormpay closed, we would have reacted the same way, ensuring members were paid out despite the process or method in which they upgraded their accounts.

When our site was taken offline for nearly two weeks we of course had no activity, which meant no new funds. Surely people believed that we could easily recover because while there was no activity in upgrades during our downtime, there was also no activity in payouts. But what many may have not realized was that after our return, activity had remained slow up until recently.

People were confused, afraid and paranoid that our site would never recover, because no other surf site had been down that long only to make such a strong comeback as we have. Lately people have realized just how strong we are as a program team, and how far we will go to ensure our programs success. Despite the previously slow and faltering activity, we continued to pay out, this time over $740,000.00.

This was our own decision however. We could have operated a bit differently upon our return such as:

- Instead of paying out when we returned, we could have asked people to start surfing again, in essence "freezing" time and activating the upgrades as if they had taken place that day. This was an option given to us by our advisors but one that we quickly rejected. We felt people had waited long enough despite the downtime being out of our control.

- We also came back and paid out with no fees, not even the small 1% fee that we had always charged since the launch of our site. Instead we focused on getting through the problems without penalizing our members whatsoever, even if it would have helped us recover faster or decreased our work load.

How we are able to do this should be no mystery, but in an industry where programs rarely do create real reserve pools and instead play with fantasy streams of income and over-inflated make believe funds, our actions and ability to pay out came as a surprise to many of our members who expected that the program would never be able to recover. It was with great pride that we resurrected the program from the confines of Closed folders, 'PROBLEM" monitor status's, and those blogs who rarely kept up to date and instead dissected our program in a very unflattering light.

In order to maintain our program, quite simply, we need to be able to continue our ability to create revenue by using your upgrades and ad purchases. What people may not realize is the shorter the wait for payout, while satisfactory to members, hinders any legitimate program from lasting as long as they can. Any investment we make takes time to grow and produce results, and with a five business day payout guideline in effect, it has been increasingly difficult to reach the numbers that we strive for within our reserve pool.

Does this mean we are short on money, and our program will die?

Absolutely not. We still have enough to continue paying up old accounts as well as new ones but with our program we never settle for "just enough'. We look towards the future and cover all of the 'what if's, such as "What if our program has problems again a year from now?"... or "What if activity slows down?". We want to ensure that we always have the funds to not only cover every member but to finally begin to grow the Wired Network itself.

To accomplish this we feel that our five business day policy needs to change, and here is what we propose:

We will change our policy to seven business days (which is still shorter than many other programs today). It also gives us time to generate more outside revenue with additional investment and partnering ventures/opportunities that we have been unable to accept because of the short time frame in which payments were due to be paid out. We will however re-activate the Insta Pay option which gives people the opportunity to be paid out within 72 hours (three business days), rather than its previous two. While these changes do not or should not make much difference to our members, it will help us increase our longevity and be able to offer you additional features, bonuses and future opportunities. It will also allow us to fully recover from all of our previous problems, as well as any that we encounter in the future.

We would like your feedback before this new policy is put into effect, because while our financial advisors believe this is the best and most simplistic route to take, we do value your input as well.

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