There is a good chance that at the very least 75% of people reading this article will have some experience of 'Paid to Surf' style campaigns. We hazard a guess that most of them would be bad experiences with few good ones. When we first heard about getting paid to surf the Internet it was from America back around the early summer time. A little known company calling itself 'AllAdvantage' was just getting started and soon to be followed by several hundred others.

So is it all as simple as it seems, does it really work and why should you (if at all) bother to join one? All these questions are hopefully about to be answered, hopefully.

The 'buck' stops here

Seems almost like a dream come true, the ability to get paid money for every hour or so you're on the Internet. Seen ultimately by most as the final straw in mass media commercialisation of the Internet, getting paid to surf is not all it's cracked up to be. For between $0.20 (Most are USA based) and $1 an hour your desktop looses around 20% of its space to a banner.

Banners are used on many web pages as a way of selling products to millions of readers all over the world at any one time and thus helping keep the web page alive. In effect you are being paid to look at a list of shops and their products with hope that you might actually like something you see. For most of us though it is a means for getting some extra cash to pay off our huge phone bills.

You can sign up with several campaigns at any one time and the banners will simply overlay each other instead of pile on top (Best way to earn money). Most systems also allow you to 'refer' people and this means you get a tiny extra amount of money for every hour they surf as well as the time you use.

Not everything glistens of gold

Some of the systems you can join are AllAdvantage, Spedia, Valuepay, Getpaid4 and GoToWorld-UK to name but a few among hundreds. It would be suicide for us to mention all the rules and such so lets just move strait along to the facts:

Fact 1) Not all systems pay you:

To date I can only recommend 'AllAdvantage' and 'Get Paid 4' because they will actually pay you. Some simply rip you off and it may be wiser to wait another half year for the bad ones to go out of action.

Fact 2) Those that do pay you often cheat:

I used an accurate time log of how long I was on-line with AllAdvantage. At the toll of around 35hours we had apparently only earned 18hours of payment. Note that for all these hours the 'getting paid' indicator was green and the AA page itself was live as we constantly checked it once every 30mins through an automated process. Most systems will cheat you a little, just a fact of life.

Fact 3) Doesn't earn you that much:

If your just one user and you live in the UK then you're only likely to earn about £6 per month on most systems. Be careful of ones that don't limit your hours, they often have drastically reduced payment options with the words 'dodgy' stamped all over them.

How do you make more?

There are two ways of getting more money, you can sign up with several programs that have similar banners and thus over lay each other or you can refer people like mentioned previously. This is where the entire system falls apart because of spam. Every single PTS (Paid to Surf) has an Anti Spam policy that means you can't ask people on Newsgroups to join you and you can't E-Mail them either (unless you are friends) as well as various other methods.

However you are allowed to tell family members and friends about it and advertise on your web page, by advertise we mean an open and honest link. Miss-Leading links and over hype are not allowed. If you break any of these rules then you can be removed from their system, but remember you must have evidence of the spam to do so or they can't act. The problem is there are literally thousands of people that are abusing these systems.

Every day people trying to get more users on there refer list to earn extra money plague the newsgroups, E-Mail and forums around the world. This is commercial exploitation of the Internet gone mad and it's getting worse.

Final word

So is it truly worth all the hassle or are you better off without it in the first place? Fact is that unless you have enough friends/family willing to use it and an open and honest medium for advertising people to join under you, there isn't much to be had. Our advice is to steer clear unless you really know people who honestly want to help use it.

If you do want to join then you could always consider joining under us:

http://www.alladvantage.com/go.asp?refid=GUI-645