Daytipper, a Lack of Business Sense

Around the holidays, the buzz was all over the different chat forums about a new site called Daytippers. The premise was submit a tip and earn $3.00 per tip if it accepted. What a great concept to earn extra money. It was easy, everyone has tips about just about anything in life. Originally it was stated to expect tips to be published and paid for within no more than three weeks. So people submitted tips and within 24 hours you got a message that stated if your tip was rejected or approved. The people were amazed at how fast the approval process was, and now all they had to wait for was the money.

We are now past the holidays, and those same forums, who were excited and buzzing about day tippers, have now turned against the once, promising cash cow. The reason, no payments. The statement about the three week waiting for payment statement is long gone from the site. Daytipper claims they will pay when they publish your tip on the site. When asked about the que and a time frame, Nathan Preheim . Owner of Daytipper stated this:

"We have literally been overwhelmed by the number of tips that have been submitted within the past several weeks. It is not uncommon to receive over five hundred tips per day. Within the past two weeks we have received four thousand tips!

Daytipper explicitly states, within the Helps page and within emails that are sent when a tip is accepted, that it can take days or weeks for tips to be published. Some tips will be published quite quickly. Other tips will remain in the tip queue for a month of more. The number of tips we can publish each day is a determined by site traffic. The more people that visit the site, the more tips we are able to publish. We have recently increased the number of daily tips published from 3 per day to 6 per day. Hopefully we'll be able to continue to publish more and more tips each day. "

In a recent article, on Associated Content by Susan Corbett, titled BREAKING NEWS: Daytipper - the Newest Internet Scam, she states :

"More than 10,000 tips have been submitted by people who assigned rights of their tips to Daytipper, with payment due upon 'publishing'. Even at the rate of 6 per day to the home page, it will take more than four-and-a-half years for each of them to take a turn on the home page."

When Nathan Preheim was told that his current way and slowness of payments is causing a bad reputation, on the forums, he stated:
"Tough crowd! We are doing our best to publish as many as we can. Our terms do NOT specify WHEN tips will be published. Some tips are published relatively quickly. Others take longer. Everyone who has had a tip published, has been properly reimbursed. As promised.

We'll continue to publish tips daily. If your tip has been accepted, you will get paid, when your tip is published. Thanks for sharing the poem. I'm sure it's frustrating for the folks that submitted. But be patient! We are privately funded (i.e. we don't have millions of dollars like AC). Channel that frustration and notify others about Daytipper. That will certainly help the situation. Writing misleading poetry won't. I hope you are enjoying Daytipper's tip sharing service. "
Here is what Mr. Preheim doesn't understand when comes to business practices. What is essentially happening is, you submit a tip, with the promise of $3.00 for each approved tip. You are actually entering into a contract with Mr. Preheim and day tippers. The contract being, you give him a tip he gives you money. When I spoke to a lawyer about contracts, Sites like Associated Content, are also a contract type site, you promise an article in exchange for money, now here is the part may surprise you, Associated Content takes up to two weeks sometimes just to approve the article you submit, then payment is usually with in a few days after approval. Daytipper approves with in 24 hours and the payment s have yet to come for many. In contract terms, Daytipper is actually in default of the contract. In the business world, once something is approved in a contract, payment must be paid in a timely matter. Daytipper is not doing that.

Another way to look at this is from an employee/employer view. You are actually working for Daytipper, you write tips and they pay you. In this case how ever the employer is now not paying you. The national Labor Board, stated in a case like this, legal action and injunctions would be put in place and assets would be frozen, to settle debts, the debts being paying the employees in timely matters.

With Daytipper, not doing any payments in timely matters, makes me wonder, does Nathan Preheim really know business practices. His defense is that "We are privately funded (i.e. we don't have millions of dollars like AC). " But according to Susan Corbett article:

"Unlike other content sites, Daytipper has no Content Managers. All the tips upload automatically as soon as the contributor completes them. The tips are immediately published to Daytipper's site and Google Adsense ads are attached to the page. Daytipper earns money from those ads, and, in theory, should be using it to pay the contributors."

When this was brought to Mr. Preheim's attention, that the tips are indeed "published" as several people found out as the fished through Daytipper site. How they found this out was by changing the number at the end of the url, on the tips. Mr. Preheim quickly changed his site so now when you click on a tip it says "Naughty, naughty! You're trying to access a tip that is not currently puplished."

After all that was said and all that been done, it apparent, that Daytipper, doesn't care that is ruining it own business, and upsetting his potential customers, the people who submit the tips are the ones who would spread the word, and go to the site. In the business world there is a saying, you make a customer happy, they tell one person, make them upset, and they tell ten people. Daytipper is doing a good job of making people unhap