Make money FAST and doing reviews instead

[cooper]

I felt like telling a story tonight...

So some time ago, the girlie got inundated with all sorts of offers to "make money fast!" which I'm sure you yourself have instantly diverted to your spam or deleted folder without paying it any mind. Problem for me though, the girlie believed the crap they were peddling on her and started to make plans about what to do with all this additional income we would soon have.

For those not in the know (either from having had only sensible girlfriends or never having had one at all), this is the dangerous stage. If you let it simmer here, assuming you've sufficiently explained the ways of the internet, you'll find that you're wrong and that a few days later she'll have sent your savings to some sheep fucker in Marocco or whatever AND used the remainder to buy that spiffy new trinket she'd always wanted but could never afford since the profits were imminent...

Okay, so maybe my girlie was just a major bitch...

Anyways, to diffuse the situation I sat down with her and walked her through the 'registration process' of one of the cheaper ones of those make money fast schemes. We paid like 10 euro and within minutes received the product of our labor: A really shitty formatted PDF that basically said "Here is a huge list of consumer review sites. Register with them and they'll pay you for reviewing crap.

The girlie was thoroughly disappointed and this would be where the story could've ended...

Except now I was intrigued. I state my opinion about some crap and they pay me? I figured what the hell. I have my own email domain, I'll create an alias, register with 2 of these review sites and we'll see what happens.

Sure enough, from one group I get what basically amounts to everyday internet commercials. Except it's more like the leaflets in your snail mail box. Not very flashy, no "Hot russian chicks wants to suck..." or fake rolexes. Just real, honest to god companies you know from real tv commercials basically giving you a modest discount on their products. And I build up credit just by loading up the URL that gets mailed to me. Note that I said "loading up", not "viewing". So I see an email appear on webmail, middle-click the button to open the link in a new window and click the remove button on the email, then when the tab stops loading I close the tab. All done, and it earned me, like, 10 cents or something. The other thing I occasionally get from this one, and exclusively from the other one, is all sorts of customer panel reviews, where they show you a product or commercial or whatever and want your opinion in the form of 20 questions answered, or they basically want to know all there is to know about you. I made a nice listing with the characteristics of a made-up persona and with that I fill in the reviews. At the end of a review you get anywhere from 1 to 2 euro.

All this is very much nickles and dimes crap that I intended to quit after a bit, but as time progressed I actually found myself amused by all this. Just to emphasize this: You do NOT get rich from this shit. Like, DUH! But you do get paid and there are a few perks. Thus far I've been sent some nuts, a bag of chips in a flavor that wasn't on the market yet and a carton of tea bags (yes, I got teabagged). You consume the stuff, tell them what you did or didn't like. They might do something useful with it, they might not. Either way you got a free something.

Nowadays I get invited for some really cool and actually quite lucrative things: Community panel forums. Basically a web forum (which I intend to hack someday. I succeeded on the previous one) via which a company will ask all sorts of questions to a small group of people and you get to really interact with them. It's like social done right. To date I've done one for a government-sponsored Google Maps wannabe (advised them to fold, so far they haven't), an A-brand of yogurt and a car brand. The first and last asked me roughly 1 or 2 questions each on 2-3 days of each week over a period of 3 weeks. And in the end you get a gift certificate to a local (and more popular) clone of amazon to the tune of 30 euro. The yogurt one is special in that they will have 3 consecutive 3-week periods separated by about 2 weeks of 'down' time, and each 3-week period is rewarded with a 30 euro gift certificate. Oh, and since it's a yogurt company, you're asked to buy and review their product, make a picture of it, post it and they reimburse you, so I've gotten 2 packages of yogurt for free aswell.

So now I'm actually making money doing this. Who knew? Not a lot, mind you, and most certainly less than I get for doing my day-job, but I do this shit DURING my day job and nobody cares so long as the work gets done. In 2013 I made 50 euro from the one and 35 from the other just for looking at commercials and entering crap on a quick panel, another 30 for being in a community and I received some products to play with. This year so far the panels alone make up for 70 euro with another 70 waiting in the wings, and the first 50 euro from the regular crap is in already aswell.

To my absolute amazement, the "make money fast" bullshit actually can make you money. Not fast by any means, and you won't get asked for the really interesting/lucrative things until after you've been doing it a while. But it can be done. And it helps for me that I consider it entertaining. Especially when....

They ask you to review their in-development websites.

Yes. Really.

I always tell them up-front that I do web development for a living, that I know the security pitfalls, that I DO know what I'm doing and what they don't want me to be doing is what I'll be doing a HELL of a lot of.

And they're cool with that. After all, the person you're telling this is some marketing girlie girl that couldn't tell a tcpdump from a certificate file. She thinks the site is FAN-TAS-TIC. And nothing ever goes wrong on the interwebs, right?

So imagine for a moment what you would do in such a situation. There's a site. It's not done, but they think they're getting there. You get to enter this new playground with all the new toys some webdev spent WEEKS making beautiful. What would you do?

Really, what would you do?

Me? I go in there, lube up (if I'm feeling generous), and tear it a new one.

Or two.

Or twelve.

I LOVE this. It might just be better than sex (did I mention my last girlie was a bitch?)

Back in the community, you have the original topic that basically says "look here <url> and tell us what you think? Anything you would improve?" and the typical response to that is people writing up 5 lines of fussing about the colors or the font but without fault all end up saying the new website is AWESOME. And in between those short slivers of uninspired "Whatever so long as I get paid" responses, there's my entry. With the last one, the review of a car brand's website, that entry stretched over 6 screenfull's, with a couple of screenshots at the end not counted in this.

I see your website has a contact form. Nice. It actually works too. I've used it to send a few emails to <the person running this community>. I trust she got them, yes? Might want to rethink this particular bit of functionality? (the script stopped after 10.000 iterations)

On this other page you invite people to upload images. That's not a very good idea from a security standpoint. You should, at the very minimum, verify it's in fact an image. I've sent <the person running this community> an email with some interesting security issues she might want to relay. If you look at screenshot_1 below you'll see a command window from where I've just added a new user called <CarBrand>Rules to the system. Maybe whoever is responsible for that machine could remove the user and install that patch I referenced in that email? I appreciate the extended functionalities provided by the website, but it might not be in <CarBrand>'s best interest to provide them...

I can be a real prick sometimes. But man do I love it! :-)

Edited May 12, 2014 by Cooper

[xrad]

Cooper, then that is you filling my spam box!!!!!!

Stop it now...!!!!

Lol......just kidding......

That was a fun read........

A few bucks here a few bucks there.........every little bit helps now days....

Just remember what the doe said when she came out of the woods.......

"that's the last time I'll agree to do that for a couple of bucks"

[james92]

That's deadly man

Would love to practice on some website's legally and get free shit ha :D

I tried making money off coinurl wrote a bash script to open the browser through tor then open the link wait for ten seconds then restart tor close the browser and do it all again but they block proxy's ha so didnt work to well

What ad viewing site do you use

[cooper]

It's not my intention with this topic to be harvesting new members for my personal benefit (*cough*Ponzi*cough*), but if you must know it's in the spoiler.

Money Miljonairs but they appear to be a .nl only troupe. If you sign up, doing so via that link benefits me to the tune of, like, 50 cents or some such.
Global Test Market these are, as the name suggests, a global player who only bug you with surveys, but these are also the more lucrative ones that occasionally send you products. I can only benefit from your joining them by getting them to send you an email and you would follow the link in that email. That would get me a grand total of 60 cents. I think we're both better off with you keeping your email address known to just yourself...

[james92]

Cool I have a vps in the netherlands :D signed up with money mijonairs can I view ad's on that one and here's my email send them on to me ha :D

Edited May 20, 2014 by james92

[Snubs]

Other than the fact that the story is incredibly sexist (like... I know a few marketing chicks who actually do know a thing or two about programming, so you never know...) I've been doing something similar for consumer freebies. :) There's a site called PinchMe that gives you free consumer goods for your reviews. Just put in a work address and your fake email and you're good. They don't pay you but you do get freebies in the mail, with little effort.

[cooper]

I don't think it's *that* sexist. I made *one* comment about the marketing chicks being it noobs and in my experience all of them were, counting those I've interacted with via this community stuff and the women working at the marketing department of places I've worked at.

I would love to see more women (#YesAllWomen) in IT and in fact think we're starting to get some traction there. In my unit alone there are 10 devs total and 2 of them are women. A fair chunk of work is done in Romania (near-shoring yaaay.... sometimes) and there are a lot more women there doing the grunt work than you see here. Here the women tend to be testers, project leads, business analists, account manager that sort of thing, and one of our 3 top-level execs is a woman and doing a pretty good job from where I'm sitting.

Here's a question for you though. In .nl it's customary that on birthdays when you congratulate someone of the other sex, you give eachother 3 kisses on the cheeks. I've known women to take that day off from work just so that would not have to face the concept of the entire department lining up to smooch them (asked one of the girls that did that if she had done anything fun that day and she said she just sat at home doing nothing but didn't want to go to work because of that prospect, decided for myself she had a good point and since made a point of only shaking hands in such situations, which occasionally gets me a "what? I'm not good enough?" look... Can't win sometimes.)

Is it like that in the US? Or is it hand shakes only anyways (in fear of a sexual harassment charge)?

I can imagine women in France having similar problems since, judging from what you see on the news, over there people that meet up always start off with a peck on the cheeck.