MageNet is an advertising company that per their website has a “huge list of advertisers willing to buy thousands of contextual ads from your sites on a regular basis.” I have been working with them since 2016. I get some ads from them, a lot of pitches that are lowball offers, we are talking $1.67 per month to advertise, which is a joke so I refuse those. Over the years I have accumulated $41.85 in my account. Their minimum for withdrawal is $50 and I have not made it there in 3 years. Recently I had an ad come into my account that would pay $6 per month, not a lot, but they wanted to prepay for 12 months so I would finally cross that $50 threshold. I placed the ad on my site and went back to the MageNet dashboard and clicked the “check” button. This is when it is supposed to go out and check my site to see if the ad was placed. I received a popup saying it was being checked and could take 5 minutes. Over 5 minutes later and no change, so I click it again and get the same popup again.
Ads on MageNet must be placed within a certain period or they expire. I tried again the next day and still had the same issue so I reached out to support. Several hours later I received a response from Nancy Ryan, “Hello Justine, Thank you for letting me know.” Um, ok how about looking at the problem and not just telling me thanks for letting you know. So I responded, “Can you find out what the problem is before the time I have to place it expires?” No response so the next day I send another email, “So the ad expired before I got to place it so I lost that money. Should I just close my account since the verification does not work? I have had a balance for a while that I cannot withdraw and that payment would have put me over the $100 mark so I could withdraw so this is very frustrating.” The next day I get a response from Nancy, “Hello Justine, Thank you for contacting us.” Another useless response and this was not some kind of auto response because it came in almost 24 hours later. So I responded, “You did not answer my questions. Why was the issue not resolved before the ad expired and I missed out on that ad? I would like to be able to reach out to them to get the oportunity to place it again and see if you can make your system work otherwise I will close my account and you need to send me the money I am owed.”
The next day I get a response from Nancy, “Thank you for your reply. I understand your feelings but you violated one of the placement rules that’s why the ad was not placed. Please see the screenshot – http://prntscr.com/ogm0cr. In order to avoid misunderstandings between us – please have a look at the placement rules for publishers before placing an advertisement. Concerning the fund’s withdrawal, note that payments less than $50 cannot be processed until you reach the minimum requested amount of $50 in your MageNet balance. Please accept at least several ads and you will be able to request a withdrawal. Thank you for your understanding.”
So it looks like they do not like ads placed sitewide, just on a specific page which the ad said “queenofreviews.com” so I assumed it was sitewide. The problem I have is why did their “check” button not tell me there was an issue? Why did it just say check in progress, wait 5 minutes. It should have said error or have some kind of intelligence to tell me when the placement is resolved. So I think their system is flawed and their support turnaround time is horrible, with those unhelpful thanks for contacting us messages. Do they just try to keep people from meeting the threshold? Maybe. So I told Nancy that I did not want to accept anymore ads, instead I wanted to close my account and withdraw my balance immediately. The website has no way for me to cancel the account so I needed Nancy to do it. Nancy then told me that even if I cancelled my account I could not withdraw my money until I got to the minimum. Wait, what? So you are going to hold my money that I have already performed work for hostage? I have worked with other companies in the past that had minimums, but if you closed your account before meeting that minimum they would close it and send the money. I asked Nancy several times to close my account and send me money or reach out to the client that had the ad expire so I could place it again and finally reach my threshold and she is just not willing to work with me. Will I ever see my $41.85 that I have waited 3 years for? Probably not. I wanted all my blogger friends and anyone else who thinks about working with MageNet to be aware of their questionable business practices and will hopefully save people some grief.
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