There are people who will testify that Yuwie was the best way to make money online ever. Then, there's the rest of us who'd like to use colorful language to describe our time at Yuwie. For a while, I tried to pretend like Yuwie was great as well, blindly claiming "Yuwie is what you make of it! It will work!", shuffling 64 cents in my pocket and 900 strangers I called friends. It was a tacky copy of Myspace with the promise that page views and page impressions would get you a lot of money. If you referred people, you'd get twice the amount. The people who made the big money were cheating the system. A lot of them got caught and were banned left and right. The rest were some kind of elite force who posted screenshots of PayPal accounts stuffed to the thousands. Glued to the promise of making friends and money at the same time, these screenshots were all the proof I needed. I thought to myself "if I work hard at this, I can make this work!". This was the period in time where I should have been fighting for a job in the real world. I was in college, but I called myself trying to "beat the system" by working for myself.
Yuwie was and always will be a failure to me for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, the site loaded slower than dribbling molasses. Second, the average effort of a user did not yield the results promised. For example, every thousand view was supposed to equal about ten to twenty cents. By the time I got my first thousand view, I had three cents to show for it. So, I followed the advice of all the "top earners". I joined groups promoting friend trains and profile view chains. I joined local groups and user-specific groups for my star sign, my location, etc. Do I have to touch down on all the friend adds I requested and approved?
Yuwie was a failure because there was way too much going on and way too little coming from the profit. The site layout was all red, all ugly, and very boring. There were also issues with broken links, viruses, malware, and unfair shares between admins, users, and all the ads that saturated the site. Where was the profit? The profit was as real as the lacefront on a certain singer's head. So were the promises. As I shamelessly talk about the embarrassing parts of my own Internet history, I'm hoping someone out there will at least think twice or research endeavors such as these.
Today I decided to look up Yuwie on a whim. I found one of my old free websites was still active, and the Yuwie link was on a links page. The impending failure I knew was coming finally happened. The asking price to purchase the failure? 15k. Something tells me it's gonna be there for a long, long time. The only thing that shocked me was the fact that it took so long to happen. After years of reading bad reviews online, it seemed like it took several more for the death of Yuwie to happen. It was a slow crawl into an expected demise.