I joined Swagbucks 3 weeks ago, and I have definitely learned some things. You should read this before you try Swagbucks (SB) for yourself. On a boring Friday evening, I was reading some blogs about bringing in extra money. I came across some information about Swagbucks and decided to give it a try. It was easy enough to sign up, after a minute, I was up and running. When you first begin, they have tutorials you can watch to learn how to use the site. You can watch them, but the site is very intuitive, it doesn’t take long for your clicks to add up some SBs.
I started with watching videos. There are tons of videos on the site; the types of things I was watching everyday anyways. The news headlines may not be as current as you would like. I watched a video about Hurricane Joaquin’s path, and how it might hit New England, the day after the storm had already passed us, way out at sea. As much as I liked the videos, they repeat day after day, normally being updated weekly. Which means I watched that hurricane video every day for a week. But, it’s not a big deal, because I just left the string of videos running in the background, and switched over to it when a story came on that I wanted to see. They give you 1 to 7 SBs for a playlist of videos.
You learn very quickly that 100 Swagbucks can normally be redeemed for about $1. This helps you figure out what is worth your time. So, the playlist of videos earns you just pennies. This makes it unlikely you will sit there and play videos that you aren’t interested in. I got a bunch of ideas for things to do at Halloween from the videos and I can’t wait to try them this weekend with the kids. So, they are entertaining and even useful videos.
Then you may want to start to branch out. The website sets a daily goal of SBs to earn, and you’ll find that watching videos won’t cut it. They have polls you can take, websites you can explore and even offer SBs for money spent at online websites, like Target, Groupon, etc. Generally, you would earn 1SB per dollar spent, which is like a 1% coupon. Would you even cut out a coupon for 1% off?
Well, I went for it, in the interest of seeing what this website had to offer. I needed some Polo shirts for my son, so I decided to buy them online at Old Navy, which for this week, you get 6 SB for every dollar spent. I was thinking, “Alright, a 6% coupon, that’s much better! I would maybe cut out a 6% off coupon…” Well, I had some reward points from my Old Navy credit card, and decided to apply them to my purchase. Even though I spent $100, the amount credited to my Swagbucks was less the rewards, or $50. They only credit you for money that came out of your pocket. Same thing happened for another store, where I had a rewards check that I used during checkout, and I wasn’t credited for the full amount that I spent there either. I’m not saying this is right or wrong, I’m just saying it is what it is.
Being the competitive type, I pushed to see how much I could earn. I ended up with about $10/week, just over 3,000 SB in three weeks. I requested my first cash out yesterday, in the form of a Visa Reward Card. It turns out that has to be used online, because it’s a virtual Visa. You don’t get a card in the mail. They also have gift cards to just about any place you can think of, or anything you can think of (ebay, Amazon, Playstation Store, restaurants, etc.).
Overall, it seems harmless, and a way to make some pennies that you don’t have to dive through your couch for. But as I think back, I have to ask my self, was $30 worth it?
Some offers on their site should be avoided at all costs. The iPhone 6S release in September had a unique offer popping up on Swagbucks. To earn your SBs, you simply had to tell the site where to mail your iPhone 6S, and it would be on its way to you. This is a complete scam (read more here). To their credit, Swagbucks removed the offer fairly quickly, I only saw it offered that one day, but if you thought you could get an iPhone 6S for free, then you probably are too busy with the spam hitting your phone and email to even read this post.
I also took issue with some of the websites the Discover option took me to. Most websites were fine, you could explore stories from all over the web. Others were just blatantly installing cookies, without even the guise of having interesting content. My computer started having issues, and my web browser would close unexpectedly. I started noticing the ads on every page were things I had recently searched for online. I was definitely being tracked.
Undoubtedly, if you are on the internet, there is some tracking going on. Just by saving preferences on some websites, you are actually installing first party cookies. But if your web browser is crashing, you’ve got some cleanup to do on your system, if you haven’t inadvertently downloaded a virus somewhere along your travels.
I think that overall, Swagbucks could be a fun way to pass your time on the internet, but watching videos and visiting sites you aren’t interested isn’t worth the pennies paid for these actions. If you add the headache of selecting an offer that gives your email to third parties, or worse, your phone number, it’s worth it to pay them to leave you alone. In fact this week, that offer showed up on my Swagbucks page – I can earn Swagbucks if I let an app have access to my account:
Um… no thanks. I don’t want to sell my privacy for pennies, which incidentally, is what I was doing for the past three weeks. Time for me to go to the National Do Not Call Registry, to re-register my number.
notyetsupermom 