Project Robin Hood - can you earn money sharing videos?

Project Robin Hood (PRH) is a fairly new site which pays you to share videos on social media sites. At time of writing ScamAdviser.com lists the domain age as 238 days and it has an Alexa traffic ranking of 89,815 worldwide.

Sharing is very easy as each page has buttons for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Google Bookmarks, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Delicious, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Evernote, Tumblr, Blogger and Friendfeed.

To earn money you are required to share their two featured videos every day. At the time I joined members had to actively share the videos, but it is now compulsory to connect your Facebook account to PRH so that videos are shared automatically each day.

Income is based on the number of views the videos receive. Every time someone clicks on the link you share, you will be credited with a view. In addition you go into a looped queue and when you reach the top of the queue you will be credited with a view for the next click, regardless of which member's link has been clicked. There is no indication of how much you would earn per view.

PRH pay their members through PayPal when their balance reaches $35.00.

Despite my uncertainty about the earning potential of the site, ​I joined PRH on 7 October 2013. I liked the idea of earning a little extra money for sharing videos and the site looked nice and uncomplicated. I didn't have great expectations as my social media following is small, but I still felt it was worth a try.

The first day there I made $0.27 and I thought that with a little effort my income would go up. The second day was disappointing as I only made $0.08 and by the third day my earnings had dropped to $0.01. I was already having doubts over whether to continue there. However I decided to give it a fair chance.

I noticed that my income was calculated as a percentage of the site's total income and as more members joined my percentage dropped lower and lower. I was getting few views from my friends and with a decreasing share of the pool there was the occasional day on which my income was actually negative. Still, I had my "good" days when the video choices were popular and by the end of October my balance had reached $2.58.

PRH has already made a few big changes since I joined the site. First they introduced the option to connect your Facebook account to PRH so that videos would be shared automatically every day. I wasn't keen to do so, but I felt it was necessary as I wanted to get into the queue early to get the maximum possible income each day. It also meant that I could wait with my Twitter shares until the time of day when I expected to get the maximum possible traffic from my own links.

PRH also introduced a new View Queue system where you can buy a place in the queue for views coming from videos other than the featured ones. The cost of joining the view queue for a particular video starts at $1.00 and increases by 3% each time another member joins the queue. I don't believe in paying to earn money, so I decided this feature was not for me.

More recently PRH has made it compulsory to have your Facebook account connected. I was not happy when I heard about this development as some of my Facebook friends are already complaining that they don't like the PRH videos. Because of this I had hoped to eventually transfer all PRH activity to my Twitter account, but this is no longer possible.

November was not a good month. My earnings were down on October and I kept threatening to leave the site as I realised that it would take me a long time to reach their minimum payout value of $35.00.

December brought a change in their way of calculating earnings. I'm not sure what they're doing differently but views are now shown in three tiers. In the three days of December so far I've earned $0.021. That's right, just a fraction over two cents!! In addition I've noticed that PRH has recalculated my earnings for October and November and that my balance for the two months has dropped from $4.25 to $2.92. I did my sums earlier and worked out that if things continue at the current rate, it will take me over 14 years to reach $35.00. I have no choice but to close my account.

If you have a massive following on social media, you may be able to earn money on PRH but, based on my own experience, I cannot recommend the site.