Not sure what would be the best section for this, but here goes.

You might remember me mentioned Cashbackworld, the shopping community that gives you discounts os several shops around the world. The division responsible for expanding that network, called lyconet, gives the oportunity to earn money by getting new customers to shop in the network.

But they do offer an interesting investment option for those who don't want to go around gathering lots of people. It's called customer clouds, where investors who fund the expansion of the network by advertising or by establishing partnerships with big companines (sports clubs, big associations,..) get a return through a small% of all the purchases made by members who joined thanks to those methods.
Or to put it another way, they get money back from all the people who joined Cashbackworld in a certain country without being referred by anyone.

Drawing a parallel to the PTC industry, they would be a sort of "rented referrals".

Since most major PTC sites I was in turned scam or are in a "scammification process", I found this to be a different investment vehicle I could get behind, since as a user of this shopping network I know there's a lot of mainstream places you can use in in europe, and there's a good number of people using them. Furthermore, the first customer cloud launched (Austrian) is already at work and paying back investors (despite some starting hiccups).

The process goes like this:
1)  Investors buy shares in the customer cloud of a country during the funding phase (there's a limited number of shares available).
2) For first three years the cloud accumulates $ from the purchases made in that country.
3) After the three years, all the worth gathered until then is paid to investors and from then for the next three years some more is paid monthly
4) At the end of the cloud time (6 years total) the investor is offered the option to renew it.

Going by the results of the first cloud, ROI was reached in about 3 years. There are several other clouds with have already been funded and will start paying this year or the next.
Right now, the only clouds available are Italy, Southeast-2 (an aggregation of customers from Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro, Turkey, Slovenia and Macedonia), Iberian peninsula (Portugal and Spain) and Germany. The first two are almost sold out, while the others should be open for funding for some months more.

Positions in the cloud can either be mini-clouds (500€ a share) or regular clouds (1500€), with the later paying back three-times more than the first, of course. Access to buy a regular cloud has some more requirements (needs some investment already in some mini-clouds, for example) and some more benefits which would take more explaining to do.

The sounds really interesting. At 3+ years it is a bit long for me and the minimum investment is also a bit steep. I have everything crashing around me right now including the possibility of my offline job so I'm not going to jump into anything until I see some of these sites start to give back what I gave them.

I think we may soon see a wave of PTC closings due to this payza mess