Pay To Read Email

Disclaimer: This is one of a series of articles which contain my personal opinions, based upon my own experiences, about various money-making programs. You may have had difference experiences which give you different opinions.

The paid-to-read-email programs seemed like a good idea at the time. The theory is simple. Advertisers need to send out emails to people, and they do not want to send spam. People want to make a little extra cash, and receiving a few emails once in a while appears to be a small price to pay. It all appeared to be a good exchange. Receive some emails, get some cash.

These programs were never really anywhere near as popular as the pay-to-surf programs, although they are closely related. Perhaps people in general just didn't want to receive advertising emails, perhaps the payouts were too small, or perhaps the companies just didn't advertise as much as the pay-to-surf firms. Whatever the reason, I never saw very many of these programs being advertised.

I did sign up for six different programs. I had basically the same experience with all of them.

At first I was excited. Yeah, it didn't seem like I would get much money, but hey, an extra $10 per month per program, well, that would add up pretty fast. All I had to do was look at a few hundred emails per month, and I'd make some money. Oh, was I naive!

I signed up and waited and waited and waited. This was odd, I was not getting any emails from any of the programs. Nothing, not a darn thing.

After a few months an email or two trickled into my inbox. I scanned each email, quickly determined that I was not interested in the product being offered and deleted it. After a while I had read a few dozen of them from each company.

Well, that probably didn't make me a lot of money, but I decided to check my accounts anyway.

All six accounts registered zero. Nada. Nothing. Not a single penny.

This was very odd. I had indeed read some emails, so I should have made some money. Perhaps I was doing something wrong?

I re-read the instructions and soon found that I not only had to read the emails ... I had to click on a link and visit a web site. I read a little closer and learned that I would get an entire penny for this privilege. One stupid little penny!

I quickly added it up and realized how stupid this type of program truly is. In order to make a single dollar, I had to read 100 emails and visit 100 web sites. With a couple of timing tests (I am very thorough) I quickly realized that to perform this task would require over an hour ... an hour's worth of work to make a dollar!

I could make more money flipping burgers.

Once I had this stunning (and late) realization, I quickly removed myself from all of the programs. As I said, worthless.