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"Paying you to surf!"-type companies: ripoff or scam?

 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
18:26 / 20.01.04
Got this pop-up ad today from a company called Surfearn.com. As far as I can make out, they want to pay to spam you. You sign up with an email attached to a paypal account, and they get their advertisers to send you commercial emails. They also have you look at sites. If you do all this, you get money in your paypal account (probably about 0.000001 of a penny per click, but hey).

It looks a little too good to be true, and therefore almost certainly is. However, my curiosity and penuriousness have wheedled my commonsense into the pub and got it drunk.

Assuming that I register a seperate email that I don't mind getting spammed into oblivion, what's the worst that could happpen?
 
 
luminocity
22:52 / 20.01.04
As far as I'm aware the worst that could happen is that one of the ads actually interests you. One of my mates tried this for a while, and although he made some money (around £20 pw) he packed it in because the time it took simply wasn't worth it. It doesn't scale very well. I have no idea how much time it took to make £20 btw, only his word that it was too long.
I guess what they get out of it is that they can promise a certain no. of views/clickthroughs to an advertiser, and as you probably have to fill out some form when you sign up, they get a better defined audience than standard web advertising.
 
  
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