Here's Why PennyPays is Not a Scam

I recently ran across a program that launched in fall 2016 called PennyPays. It's essentially based on two concepts:

1. Get paid to share posts on Facebook (which are paid for by individuals or businesses wanting to spread their messages through social media).
   
   
2. Buy "post shares" as an individual or business in order to spread your message through social media.

You can join for free and engage in either option. You can also upgrade at a cost of $9.95/month in order to make more from sharing posts, and to get a discount on purchasing post shares.

Doing some research into the company, I ran across several posts calling this company a recruiting scam because there's no product or service. But here's why PennyPays is not a scan.

I'm a digital marketer by trade. This means I spend a lot of time with digital marketing software and services, and clearly being able to purchase post shares on Facebook is one such service. And PennyPays allows you to do this with a free account. Upgrading just provides you with a discount. That sounds like a pretty standard and legitimate business model to me.

Basically, if you're planning to buy more than a certain number of shares to spread your message each month, make sure to upgrade -- it will save you money. Sort of like upgrading your phone plan if you plan on using a lot of minutes so you're not paying for minutes individually.

We can look at the rest of the business, but the fact of this one service legitimizes everything about the program. At least as a business model. This doesn't mean they will run the company well or that they offer the best post sharing value. But it does mean that the business model is legitimate.

Now let's talk about value. There are other companies that will sell you more shares for less money. But as a professional digital marketer, I'd be wary of using these services because I haven't seen transparency around the accounts that actually do the sharing. They might claim to be US based. They might claim to be "real" accounts. But there's no explanation of how they're accumulated.

PennyPays, on the other hand, interfaces with Facebook directly and takes each account through a verifying process that I already experienced. It verifies where you live for local shares (and this can't be changed more than once a month). It verifies how many friends you have, and you can't have fewer than 50 (so you can't set up fake accounts and make money). You're paid more based on having more friends, but have a limit as to how many new friends you can have each month so you're not cheating your way into higher earnings. And you can't share privately in order to gip the business of its exposure -- you have to share to Friends or to Public.

This is all VERY transparent and should be attractive to businesses that want to have their messages spread through real shares on real accounts. And yes, there's value to this kind of sharing for the business.

At the time of this writing, PennyPays still needs to refine its targeting options. The first critical step is for "web shares" (rather than local shares for local businesses) to allow country targeting, as many of us operate in single countries only. I believe this will begin to increase the number of ads being bought. And increasing ads bought is critical because right now there are few opportunities to share posts, and therefore few opportunities to earn by sharing them.

But these are the growing pains of any young company.

Bottom line ... yes, there is an opportunity to earn by promoting the service to other people. You can earn whether they upgrade or not (earn when they earn by sharing posts); and you can earn from the matrix of people below you when they do upgrade. But you're not earning for recruiting people into something with no product or service; you're earning for selling a monthly subscription to a real digital marketing service.