Is Supload.com a scam?

A lot of you by now are aware of what appeared to be a promising image hosting site, stating that any image you host linking back to the site will earn a 50% share of all ad profit - paid via bitcoin. This seemed great on paper but within weeks it was marked on Reddit.com as a spam site. Which is fair enough, maybe it was because of Reddit's old partnership with Imgur.com or maybe they thought it would drive the quality of content down due to spam - we can only speculate.

You can see the original post by /u/rizzles (one of the site owners) here

As for myself, I waited a month to see if it would go anywhere, before committing my time to earning a small passive income via hosting some content. Eventually I read a post on Reddit stating that a person was struggling to cash out. /u/rizzles was quick to post, advising that this was due to high amounts of bot traffic:

Sorry, it's been for protection against bot traffic we've been seeing the last week. All accounts that have been getting that message will be able to withdraw tomorrow on the 1st.

So I went ahead and created my account and started posting where I could, driving traffic to my links but doing my best not to appear spammy. Within 2 weeks or so, I had made my first 10$, posting a couple images every 3rd or 4th day but since I'm in the UK I wanted to withdraw £10 - meaning I waited a little while longer to get around $12+ which would convert to £10. When I tried to cash out here is what I was shown:

(Please note this image is fairly recent but the message was the same over a week ago also)

After searching Reddit I stumbled upon this post, where another user had the same issue. If you read through the comments you'll notice that they were eventually paid out, after some time.

I ended waiting a couple days, trying numerous times and getting the same error (even tried just now, while writing this post) with no change.

I even emailed [email protected]:

You'll notice in the email I mentioned that the site seems "abandoned". The reason I say this is even though there's plenty of new images being hosted daily, /u/rizzles himself has not posted for at least a month now. I still haven't had an email back.

For the past 5 days or so I haven't been hosting with Supload. My views are still constantly ticking up, my money is going up yet I still can't withdraw.

I guess the questions for my dear Steemians are:

Have you been paid out, if so how recently?

Do you think the site is a scam?

Could it be that the owner simply took a long holiday for a month (maybe with all those wonderful ad earnings!)?

If it does indeed turn out to be some simple explanation then Supload.com and their staff have my sincerest apologies. For now, I am going to continue being skeptical until I hear some good news from an official source (or at least an email reply from the site!)

Thank you for reading, I look forward to hearing your thoughts! Please follow me if you haven't already.

Please note, I am still very new to Steemit and would appreciate any help & pointers if there is something wrong with my post!