As others have said, it's a "multi-level marketing" a.k.a "pyramid selling" scheme. You make your money by selling the concept (and Shopping Genie application) by singing up your friends/colleagues etc. to create your own "pyramid" or "network" where you earn a little from every click on every site your "downliners" set up. You don't make money by actually making the Shopping Genie service available to customers (fractions of a penny per search).
As with all these schemes - it reaches saturation point and only the initial few joiners (those at the tops of the pyramids) make any money (as they have the biggest networks of people).
I am amazed at the number of otherwise successful, level-headed and normally sound business colleagues that have suggested this scheme to me over the last year or so. My normal response is "you fcukwits". When you look at it - the product itself (the Shopping Genie application) is very average, doesn't work very well and offers nothing beyond what existing web sites like PriceRunner have done for years - for free. The product is value-less, the only value is in building a big network selling the chance to sell this value-less product to others!