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Please read what he (Jim Hunt CEO) have to say to his disapponted and angry members that trusted him but he taked from them everything!!! :
"JimHunt
Site Admin
Posted: Sun Oct 09, 2005 11:41 pm Post subject: Member News October 10 12:40am - The Future
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Thank you all for your feedback and suggested solutions to our cash-flow problems. This message is very long, but I hope you will please read it carefully and understand the spirit in which it is written.
To recap the 4Daily.com story, 4Daily.com commenced operations on Oct 24 last year.
We enjoyed unprecedented growth and quickly became one of the top 2 auto-surf sites on the Internet.
We received and paid out millions of dollars and huge profits were made by thousands of members.
We were copied by hundreds of wanna-be sites, most of which have fallen by the wayside.
We were also the target of hackers, vandals, cheats and smear campaigns trying to bring us down.
Some members found and exploited loopholes in our original plan and that quickly got out of control before we stopped it.
Our growth was so rapid that we had trouble keeping up with providing adequate server resources.
In May, our servers were hit with a severe Denial of Service attack that lasted for several weeks, preventing many parts of the world from reaching our site.
To improve our server security and capacity, we made a provider change that was nearly fatal and we had the disruption of moving servers again.
These events and others combined to reduce our growth dramatically and resulted in us having to reduce payouts.
By that time, the snowball was well and truly in reverse and we struggled to find ways to get it rolling forward again.
Our efforts succeeded to stem the trend and create positive growth, but not nearly enough to correct all the damage that had been done.
The nature of this type is business is that it needs growth and growth creates more growth. But when something goes wrong and growth slows, it can be very hard to stop the spiral.
As we approached another disappointing payout day, we appealed to members for more suggestions and ideas to solve the problem. Everything that we had tried was not effective enough, fast enough.
That resulted in a 36 page forum thread (now closed) of mixed and conflicting opinions, many of which showed poor understanding of the way money works in the "real world".
We have digested and considered all of the suggestions, from doing nothing, to doing the impossible, from paying less than we can, to paying more than we can, from shutting down the site to put us all out of our misery, to writing off all our losses and starting again.
So let us look at where we are and what we have.
The 4Daily.com site and concept has attracted over 226,000 signups. Many came, looked and went, but we currently have 73,000 members active, including many excellent marketers. We have turned over millions of dollars in real cash into and out of the program and circulated many millions more within the program.
Some members ask "where did the money go?". Of course, a very small portion had to go to operating expenses but the rest has been paid out to members. Many thousands of members have made very good profits.
4Daily.com has proved to be a very viable and effective advertising vehicle, even though our plans to capitalize on that and to expand our offerings have been delayed by our problems.
Consider the current position:
1. Amount in the cash balances of 73,000 members waiting to be paid = $9 million and growing rapidly
2. Amount required to ensure all members get at least their money back = $1 million
3. Amount of cash available = $110,000 and growing slowly
So you can see the scale of the problem. We have tried many things but we have been treading water for the last few months and not able to move forward fast enough.
The natural solution is to give up and close the site down. But that is not what we are here for. So how do we overcome the obstacles and get back to growing again? As I have stated elsewhere, it is easy for a new site to create growth. When you start from a base of nothing, anything is "growth". The trick then is to maintain the momentum for as long as possible. 4Daily did it a little TOO well for over 6 months but now the wheel has slowed.
What we really need, as many of you have suggested, is some new rules and a fresh start. Which brings us to the plan...
At midnight on Monday Oct 10 the 4Daily.com site will be taken offline for 24 hours while we reset parts of the database. All accounts and sites will be preserved. All credits, banner orders and referrals will be preserved. All current (unexpired) upgrades PAID WITH OUTSIDE FUNDS will be preserved. The earnings of those upgrades will be reset to zero and the START DATE will be reset to Wednesday Oct 12. All other transactions and history will be reset. All support tickets and forum posts will be deleted, ready to start again. We will not be able to respond to questions about the "old" accounts.
We have agonized long and hard about how to pay or carry forward the "loss" position that some members are in. As you can see from the figures above, it would be a mill-stone that could prevent us from gaining ground again. Unfortunately, Cash Balances will have to be reset to zero to give everyone a chance to earn again.
So we will be restarting on Oct 12 from a zero base with a clean slate and some new rules. All unexpired PAID upgrades will start again. The current funds we have will be held in reserve for payouts commencing from November. Otherwise, we could still have payout issues in November.
If you have a need for credits or surfbar banners, you can use your cash now to buy them before the site goes offline. Prices of credits and banner ads will be doubled soon, so now is a good time to stock up. You cannot use your cash for upgrades. Only upgrades paid from outside will be preserved.
We will issue every account with a free $4 starting bonus and 40 credits, as though you just joined. If you have paid for an upgrade in the past, your account will retain "paid" account benefits. Your status will not be set to "free", even if you have no current paid upgrades.
Here is a summary of the new rules, which will appear in our Terms:
1. Free accounts will receive a free $4 bonus upgrade and 40 credits for joining. You can earn money with the upgrade and spend your earnings on advertising credits and banners. You cannot compound or take your earnings out in cash unless you first buy at least one $4 upgrade with your own cash.
2. Earnings for surfing will remain at 4% per day for viewing 40 (or up to 80) sites, but for 30 DAYS instead of 50 days. That means that you can earn 120% (20% profit) in 30 days instead of 200% (100% profit) in 50 days. Please remove all references to "50 days" and "double your money" from your advertising. You can still earn up to $400 a day with a maxed $10,000 account. Note that the existing current upgrades will also have a life of 30 days, from Oct 12.
3. Credits earned for surfing will be halved to 1 for each 2 sites viewed (1:2). You will continue to get 4% of your first referral level credits and 1% of your second level. We do not provide credits for displaying your referral page because of the junk traffic that is generated.
4. Referral commission will remain at 4% of upgrades paid with external funds, first level only.
5. You cannot upgrade your referral accounts from your Cash Balance. We want all new members to spend their own money to upgrade.
6. You may upgrade your own account with your Cash Balance (compounding) with no fees, for any amount, at any time, but only ONCE PER MONTH. You can upgrade with outside funds anytime for any amount up to our maximum level of $10,000.
7. Payouts will continue to be processed on about the 15th of each month. There will be no payout on October 15 because everything will be reset. Upgrades will expire after 30 days, so payouts will be available on or about November 15.
8. To be eligible for payout, you must have at least $40 in your Cash Balance and at least $4 in your member level. We will only pay to accounts that have one or more CURRENT upgrades.
9. A fee of 4% will be deducted from cash payouts to recover processing costs. This fee will not apply to upgrades from earnings.
I know that some of you will be hurt by this plan and lose real and "virtual" money. But anything is better than the alternative of closing down. At least you will have another chance to get into profit.
It will be like having a new account in a new site with proven rules, and an admin who is determined to make it work. As always, I am here to do the best I can and I am not interested in running with your money. Remember that I do not have the dollars you lost - the many thousand of members who took profits have them. I am glad that so many have made money and I am sorry about those who have not. The best I can do is provide you with another chance to try again, if you want it.
It is a bitter pill for many of us to swallow, but it really is time to cut losses, forget the past and move on.
At last, we will be able to concentrate on our expansion plans. We are working on adding to our advertising offers and adding new products to the site.
Also, we will be introducing 2 new auto-surf sites in coming weeks. They will incorporate some of the excellent suggestions you have made and they will target different market areas.
Their launch is very close, so I can tell you a little about them now. One will be a very conservative, 1% a day site with a limited money back guarantee. It will be aimed at users with a low-risk, longer term profile. The other site will pay you even if you cannot surf! You can earn 2% a day when you surf and 1% a day when you can't. It will fill a need in the market for users who have a life outside surfing!
So 4Daily will become a group of 3 auto-surf sites. Accounts with the new sites will be created automatically for all active 4Daily members. Effectively, you will be in on the ground floor of 3 sites with different markets, an admin who you know, and all of their growth ahead of them. And your current downline will be with you.
The funds of each site will be held separately from the others, so if one should fail because of market conditions, the others will not be affected. The group will add strength to each of the sites.
These sites will become the base for a revolutionary marketing plan that we have been working on for many months. We hope to be able to announce the details early in November. Meanwhile it is top secret because it will be a world first for this industry and is sure to be copied as much as 4Daily.com has been. Again, you will be in at the start.
So all is not doom and gloom. It is time we bit the bullet and hit the road again. I think the future for 4Daily.com members is finally looking very bright indeed.
Of course, some of you will not share this vision and may be bitter about us. Before you go off to try for refunds or make trouble, remember that the Terms you accepted when you joined 4Daily.com contain plenty of warnings and they give you no recourse. They are there to protect your fellow members from people who can't accept rules or responsibility for their own actions. Please mark your messages "Hate Mail" for our filter.
You can choose to be with us, with a chance to win out in the end, or to be against us and certainly lose.
To summarise:
4Daily.com will be offline all of Oct 11. The site will restart with new rules and terms on October 12. Members can earn 4% a day for 30 days (120%). All current upgrades (paid from outside) will restart on October 12. Full payouts under new rules will resume in November. Current cash will be reset to zero but can be used to buy credits and banners before midnight Oct 10.
Now, you can stop surfing and have a day or so off while we restructure this snowball and move it back to the top of the hill!
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Jim Hunt, CEO
http://4Daily.com
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