So as anyone who was around back in the heady, halcyon days of the first internet gold rush can tell you, there used to be tons of nascent websites and services promising something for nothing. While this is a perennial favorite advertising technique, the newness of the online environment lowered many people’s otherwise acute bullshit defenses and people signed up left and right for a plethora of “get paid for surfing the web,” “get paid to read ads,” and “get paid for nothing at all, really, we swear” schemes. I was no exception — I distinctly recall running something like three adbar programs simultaneously at one time — but as we all found out, very few of these new ventures survived long enough to pay anyone for anything, assuming they’d ever intended to.
Yet somehow here we are well into the 21st century and somehow, MyPoints is still around. I’m not sure why they survived while all the others I signed up for back in the day have long since been forgotten, but they are. Better yet, they’ve stood the test of time and they’ve proven to me that unlike most online marketers they deliver on what they promise. Each week I get a certain number of MyPoints emails in my inbox, each usually delivering between 5 and 50 points into my account. Eventually, they pile up enough that I redeem them for something valuable or useful from the MyPoints selection of rewards — lately I’ve just been getting Wal-Mart gift cards, since I know I’ll inevitably have to go to Wal-Mart anyway (no matter how much I try to avoid it) it’s basically like getting money. No, it’s not like getting a ton of money, but it’s something for nothing, and it’s enough to be helpful and appreciated when it’s time to get toiletries or a microwave oven or whatever.
In order to give some sort of ballpark figure what to expect, I logged into my MyPoints account, which tells me I have redeemed 33050 points during my time with them. At current exchange rates (they used to be quite a bit lower, so this is a pretty conservative estimate) that would work out to 21 10$ Wal-Mart gift cards, or $210 bucks. Like I say, it’s not tons of free cash, but hey — that’s $210 bucks for doing basically nothing that I wouldn’t have had otherwise.
One of the things that I think has helped contribute to the company’s survival is that they don’t have the kind of referral link system that encourages people to just spam referrals everywhere in hopes of profiting off of what’s essentially just a digital pyramid scheme. One can make referrals, but only on a one-on-one, personal direct email, and each member is limited to only five referrals per month in order to discourage spam. If you’d like to sign up for MyPoints as one of my referrals, send an email to apoehler@hotmail.com including your name and I’ll try to sign you up. (If I happen to have used up my referrals already for that month, I’ll put you in the next month’s queue. I promise.)
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