I’ve fallen for it a few times in my life. A business offers you something that sounds too good to be true, but the security it falsely offers is so tempting that I just couldn’t say no.

It happened to me first when I started my schooling at a private company for the beginning of the Information technology career. They ended up going bust when I was halfway through my course, and we lost everything.

ezoic

Online, you always get the occasional bit of spam mail if you are one of the sites that have a contact page available. Most of the time I read at least the opening sentence to see whether it’s a Nigerian or just an American ass hole. Occasionally someone is intelligent enough to word something together that doesn’t sound half bad, so I continue reading.

Since this is a post about Ezoic and you know I have had an experience with them you would probably assume that Ezoic falls into the latter category, but they don’t. Ezoic’s original email to me was so pathetic I actually abused them. To my surprise, I received a reply and a calm reply. That was the beginning of my relationship with Ezoic.

In hindsight, I most definitely should have trusted my gut feeling which was Ezoic was complete bullcrap, but they have the force of Google Adsense on their side listed as an official Publishing partner which is hard to argue with.

There are in fact many official publishing partners of Google’s for Adsense which aim to help people boost their revenue since getting the most revenue out of your online business is not easy at times. Ezoic is also one of them, and the scam isn’t anything to do with them not being an official publishing partner.

Unfortunately for Google, Ezoic is nothing more than a complete scam, and it’s a shame Google employees responsible for choosing official publishing partners did not realize it.

Ezoic’s way of making money is by telling you that they put one of their ad links at the bottom of your page and that is the only way they make revenue from you. Of course, there is no way to prove this; you just need to trust it, and if you do question it or ask them about it the reply you get it “we are an official Adsense publishing partner.”

What Ezoic does is tell you about ten times that they are Google’s official publishing partners, and then they set up this dashboard inside their website for you to use as your statistics. They take control of your Adsense account so you can no longer see how your Adsense is performing from the traditional Adsense screen and everything you are shown is from the backend of Ezoic.

That was a huge red flag, and I picked it right away, but the head honcho kept replying with “we are an official Adsense publishing partner” which is always hard to ignore.

Being fraudulent themselves, they go to great length to disguise their fraudulence. The one thing that they do offer is being able to choose what percentage of your traffic goes through the Ezoic system and what percentage goes through the Adsense system so you can see how it works. However, this is just another somewhat clever disguise. Anyone who knows advertising knows that traffic comes from many different countries, and those countries will make you different amounts of money per click. For example, traffic from the US is usually traffic that pays well. So if Ezoic offered to control traffic and allow a certain percentage of it through to Adsense, you would need to see what countries they are allowing traffic through. The obvious ability to scam you here is the fact that they can easily control the countries themselves and this make the revenue appear to be working in their favor.

My blog continued to grow throughout my time at Ezoic, and they did show that my revenue was improving. However, I had been using Adsense for years already, and I noticed something else fishy. My revenue seemed to be remarkably consistent and climbing remarkably consistently almost like it was being controlled.

As I continually question Ezoic as being genuine, I began to browse the internet for reviews of Ezoic, and there were many available that you could find from websites that had previous experience with Ezoic or that still were involved with Ezoic and displaying Ezoic themes. They always said that Ezoic was great, it really worked and so forth.

So at this point I had noticed that my revenue amounts looked suspicious, they don’t let you see anything from your Adsense, and everything is controlled through their Ezoic dashboard, the method of them making revenue from your blog is suspicious because there is no way of seeing what they are taking revenue from, you just have to take their word for it and now I was reading reviews online that also seemed fake and paid reviews by site owners who had decided to take the money to tell a lie.

The last straw for me was getting emails from Ezoic about “success” stories and how much those websites were earning—they claimed that one of them was making a million dollars per year from ad revenue being hooked up to Ezoic. I did the math on that in my head and if I were getting the same traffic as them there is no way I would come anything close to a million dollars, so it also raised another red flag. It was most likely a complete lie.

At this time I decided to take Ezoic off my site and go back to using the normal Adsense account, and guess what happened next? My daily revenue went through the roof. I was breaking all sorts of revenue records for my site using my standard Adsense account in comparison to when my revenue was gradually growing day by day hooked up to Ezoic. I had never felt so scammed in all of my life.

Ezoic is an utter scam from my experience. The dashboards they show you are fake and controlled by them to manipulate you into believing they are doing something positive. It is manipulated to make you believe your revenue is growing each week just the way Ezoic promised. It manages to do that because it isn’t showing you the real earnings that your ads would be making, and it is likely collecting all of that additional revenue that should be in your pocket. In roughly six months of using Ezoic, I must’ve lost thousands of dollars in revenue and that was when my site was quite small. Their emails are spam, and their success stories are fake. The large websites that are using Ezoic they like to show off are being paid by Ezoic to use Ezoic just so they can show that a large site is using their system. I did research on the domain that they like to show as their main success story (BrightHub), and the founder is a lawyer who already makes a lot of money and would be more than happy to sell out to Ezoic for the right price. They also collect your revenue. Don’t be fooled into thinking that “we only take revenue from the ad at the bottom of the page” is true. That is bullshit.

You have be warned. We recommend staying as far away from Ezoic as possible.

Footnote: they also lie through their teeth constantly on their website. During my visits, the front page of the websites changed from growing your revenue up to 200% and then it later changed to double your revenue 100%, and now if you visit it today, it says grow your revenue 400%. I think they forget that the same people visit the site and see their lies.