So I’m going back to school at the end of the month. I spend a LOT of time online in my dorm room, since I do have a free T1 connection there but I don’t have a TV, stereo, or any other form of electronic entertainment. That’s because I’m poor. I was reflecting upon this situation today, and happened to think of all those GET PAID TO SURF! spam messages I’ve received in the past.
I’m sure some of these things are scams, and most are probably so obnoxious that they wouldn’t make the few pennies you’d actually earn worthwhile. But I’m broke enough that I’d be willing to set up an extra e-mail account and spend a few minutes a day going clicky-clicky or filling out online surveys if I could make even $5 or $10 a month. Is this possible? Is it possible without suffering dire consequences like being flooded with junk mail for the rest of my life, or inflicting more web ads on others?
I am one of the few people I know who ever got a cheque from these sort of people.
A few years ago, when these deals were first coming out, I installed one and ran one for a while and got a nice $50 US cheque!! (which is like 7 million canadian dollars!!)
That does not answer your question in the here and now, but we each say what we can.
Whatever you do, don’t bother with NetFlip.
They claim you can make all this money by doing surveys and trying products for free. What they didn’t say is the only way to make anything over sixty cents is to fill out credit card apps AND get approved or subscribe to pay sites/mags.
I supposedly won a free subscription to “young MS” but I got a bill in the mail today. When I wrote to ask about it, they said it was “Free for the first 100 applicants”. It didn’t say this ANYWHERE on the site.
Ugh. I spent a good three hours dinking on it last week and got two bucks for joining. You don’t even get a check until you reach 20 bucks. That could take a year at the rate I’m going.
I don’t know about the deals where you install programs, but if they slow you down, it’s not worth it. At least not for me
I signed up with Pinecone Research when I saw their banner on a gaming site I go to. They give you surveys that take about 10 minutes to fill out and pay you five bucks for each one completed. There might be some requirements, but it’s been so long that I forget. I’ve done a bunch (about 3 per month) and have never not received my check. The checks come fairly quickly, too. You might give it a try.
At a friend’s urging, I signed up with the now-defunct AllAdvantage a couple of years ago. You installed their toolbar, which sat at the bottom of your screen and displayed ads as you surfed, and you recieved payment at a rate I can’t remember now for the length of time you spent actively using it. You also got a percentage of the time the people you referred spent using it.
After a month or so, I got an irate email from the friend who asked me to join saying that she’d had part of her balance revoked because one of her referees had been cheating, and using some program to simulate active use when they hadn’t been really using it. She only had two active referees, so she emailed both of us. We both denied being the cheater. Neither of us was accused or penalised that month.
The following month, AllAdvantage told me I was being investigated, and later informed me that I had been caught cheating and that part of my balance was being revoked. I wrote back, told them I wasn’t cheating and asked for dates and times so I could confirm it wasn’t someone else who had used my computer that month. They refused to give me that information, telling me it would violate their privacy policy. The deduction they made put me just barely under their minimum monthly payout figure, so the balance was rolled over into the next month.
Meanwhile, their crappy toolbar kept crashing my computer, so I contacted them for technical advice, surfed only enough to get to my minimum payment amount and sat back and waited. They never responded.
The following month, despite the fact that I’d only surfed a tiny amount in order to get my balance up to minimum payment, I was again informed that I had cheated for the month, and this time they revoked my entire balance - even the portion that had been earned in earlier months, and not previously found to have been earned through cheating! I left in disgust, and celebrated when they went broke a couple of months later.
To sum up:
They deducted money from my friend in month one, saying someone had cheated in month one. They did not “investigate” anyone that month.
They “investigated” me for cheating in month two, and took a portion of my money, but cleared the rest. They did not reclaim this money from my friend (who had earnt referral fees from my “cheating”). The amount she had deducted in the first month didn’t match what I had taken in the second month.
In the third month, they again “investigated” me for cheating, and this time took my entire balance for months 1, 2 and 3. They did not reclaim this money from my friend either.
My friend did manage to get one paycheck out of them before they went under, but I came out behind in the order of a few dollars - the money I wasted redialling in to the internet when their software crashed my computer - and a significant amount of time.
Also, you **hate to use browsers you son’t want to use. I like using Opera, Netcaptor and Mozilla, because each utilizes my surfing wizardry to the max (I am looking at 12 different web pages now.) But these PTS don’t log hours using these browsers.
Several years ago (centuries in internet time) I signed up with AllAdvantage, and actually got several $20 checks from them. But that was before the internet bubble burst, and they went belly up like all the others. I would be shocked to find a pay-to-surf operation still extant today, especially if they were actually paying out hard cash.
