Here is a sob story for everyone.

A few years back I wrote an extremely popular article on how to get your own free custom e-mail address. As part of the process of getting your own free e-mail address, I directed users to register a free CO.CC domain. While I directed people to CO.CC because of how easy CO.CC made it to integrate with Google Apps (the e-mail provider), an added perk was that for every person I sent to CO.CC that registered for a free domain, I was paid $0.10.

10 cents per sign-up is not a lot, but over the past few years that article has received a lot of hits and many people have signed up with CO.CC as a result. However, because 10 cents per register is not something to drool over, I totally forgot about my referral status with CO.CC a few months after writing the article. Then, out of the blue, I remembered that I still have an affiliate account with CO.CC and likely have a good amount of money accrued in my CO.CC referral account which I haven’t cashed out yet. So I went to check, and lone and behold I have roughly $600 sitting in the account.

Now $600 of earnings over three years is not a lot by any stretch of the imagination, but from my point of view it was simply free money — an unintended perk of me writing that article. So I decided it is time to cash out and have them pay me what they owe. And cash out I did. The catch, however, is they would not pay me instantly but rather a month after I requested the payment. To me, waiting a month isn’t that big of a deal. After all, CO.CC has been around for years and is fairly reputable. Or so I thought.

As my luck may have it, CO.CC seems to have shut down a few days after I requested my payout but before I received it. It has been up for years but decided to shut down now. Arggghhh!

I’m not sure if existing CO.CC domains still work but they won’t accept new applications and won’t even let me log into my affiliate account. Now I have no idea if I will actually be paid the $600 they owe me. While it won’t kill me to not get it, it would sure be nice.

Moral of this sob story: don’t forget about free money!