Sponsored Review: MillionTutorials.com

Important: Please read the entire post. Over the course of the last month I’ve done 4 paid reviews of websites (including this one). While it is not at all required, the first three have been fairly positive reviews with only a few points of what I hope was constructive and useful criticism. Unfortunately, I’m a lot less impressed by the site I’m reviewing for you today.

At first glance milliontutorials.com seems pretty straight forward. The site is focused around a revenue sharing program in which the user provides the content and Million Tutorials (MT) splits the AdSense revenue from that tutorial with the author 50/50. Now I fully realize this is a brand new site (it looks to have been launched about a week ago) and that every strong and successful site has to start somewhere, however, as of right now, I can see no reason tutorial authors would use this program.

For this program to be worthwhile for content creators, the domain needs to be very strong, and have a lot of ranking power or a lot of traffic. This site is, by all indications, lacking both. Therefore, authors would be creating content for a site they don’t own, have to promote that content, and then split the proceeds with Million Tutorial. If the site were established and already ranking well for several terms it would be a different story. Authors would just have to write their tutorials, post them, and sit back and watch as the site’s strength propelled their tutorial to the top of the search engines. It would generate its own traffic and authors would be paying Million Tutorials 50% of the AdSense earnings in exchange for essentially promoting their content.

However, as I said, right now that’s certainly not the case. MillionTutorials will have to deal with sandboxing issues, as well as build up an impressive profile of links. Since they are essentially starting from scratch, I don’t see why tutorial authors wouldn’t just create their own niche specific website or blog and keep all of the revenue for themselves. While MT does fairly well in terms of on page SEO (they have decent title tags, use keywords in their internal links, 301 redirect the non www. version of the site, and have search engine friendly site structure etc), as of this writing Yahoo only reports about 280 external links pointing to milliontutorials.com. The bulk of those come from a single forum and one other foreign website. While taking steps such as purchasing this Sponsored Review is a step in the right direction, there’s a LOT more work to be done before their site model would have any appeal in my eyes.

Also, there’s another issue that I debated whether or not to bring up. As I mentioned, the bulk of milliontutorials.com’s links come from a forum. To be more specific, they come from 9sem.com. While that domain might not ring a bell to many of you, it jumped off the screen when I saw it. If you recall, 9sem.com was one of the site’s that had purchased reviews from SponsoredReviews with what were discovered to be stolen credit cards. Of course we can not be 100% certain that 9sem.com had any involvement in the matter, but it certainly raises a few flags. The fact that milliontutorials.com receives most of its links from 9sem.com along with the fact that links to the site also show up along side links to 9sem.com in several signatures on ddth.com is more than enough circumstantial evidence to convince me. I would put no faith or trust in this website, I do not at all endorse it, and would not recommend anyone sign up for the program. As I said, it is possible that neither 9sem.com nor milliontutorials.com are involved in any unethical activity, but in my experience when something just doesn’t feel right, it’s better to back away. Combine this issue with the points made earlier and I would expect you to come to the same conclusions I did.

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Now, doing a review like this may give future advertisers a moment’s pause. This is not the gushing endorsement an advertiser would like to see. However, they, as well as you, my readers, should know this. I will never lie, mislead, or sugarcoat any review I do whether paid or not. SponsoredReviews (as well as most of the other paid review services) does not place any stipulation on whether reviews have to be positive or negative. If they did, I would not participate. Integrity and trust are two things that can not be purchased and if readers of this blog ever lost trust in the integrity of this space, all this work, time and effort will have been for nothing. After that disclaimer if you’d still like to have your website reviewed in this space, you can do so through SponsoredReviews.