Hello there again my fellow sea changers. I hope you are all having the world’s best day. Today we continue our journey into the world of online income generation by looking at another extremely popular “get paid to” site called swagbucks. This site is one of the largest around and you earn money via such actions as completing surveys, watching videos, shopping and undertaking online searches. Can you make money with swagbucks? I am sure you can. Let’s however see if it is worth it… .
As with most of these sites, you will make money with time and patience. They are legitimate operations and do pay out once the member has performed enough tasks to warrant it. My concern as always however is the time it takes to make the cash and whether you would be better off spending this time elsewhere. So, as usual, I will:
- Join
- Do each of the tasks as best I can
- Time it all
- See how much $$ I can earn for the time spent…
What is swagbucks
As I said earlier, swagbucks is a “get paid to” site that pays its members via swagbucks for such actions as:
- Completing online surveys
- Trialing products and services
- Watching videos
- Discovering stuff – websites etc.
- Performing online searches
Functions work in a similar fashion to others such as Clixsense and Apex Focus Group where you are paid based on tasks completed.
My experience
I got involved in doing online surveys a few years back and I did indeed earn some income. To be honest I cannot remember the name of the company that I did mine through then but it was all above board and I managed to earn about $100 over the month that I did them. I was sent survey links via email or I could log into their site and see what was available to me and then complete them online. I was then paid on a per survey completed arrangement.
The only problem that I had with them, and the reason I only lasted a month was that the time I spent on doing the surveys far outweighed the amount of money I was making. In fact, I worked out that the time it took me to earn the $100 equated to roughly $2 an hour so to earn that I did about 50 hours worth of surveys. At the time it was just not worth it for me but I do remember thinking that for someone who was interested in doing this full time, then maybe there could be some money to be made. That said, there are a few more money making additions to swagbucks than the programs I used in the past so maybe I can get some cash a little faster here.
How does swagbucks work?
In order to fully test the value of this platform, I joined and undertook some activities. After I joined and confirmed my application via email – which earned me 5 swagbucks (SB) – I was in and ready to get started.
From the first screen, there are some tasks that you can undertake in order to get your account set up and “earn some gift cards”.
I am game… So to get this done, I need to do the following:
- Fill out a quick survey
- Try out a local newspaper
- Activate a $10 shopping bonus
- Refer a friend (my wife was very impressed haha)
- Set my default search engine
- Answer a survey
- Enter a swagstakes
- Download the swagbucks app
So, in an effort to see how much money I could make and how long it would take, I tried to do them all with the following results:
Tasks achieved – 7/8 – One of the functions was not working
Time taken – 26 minutes
Amount earned – 103SB (I also spent 5SB to enter a ‘swagstakes’ where I am in a raffle to win 100,000SB)
So, what can I get?
It looks to me, based on the list above, that 1SB is equal to $0.01. So for all of my hard work so far I have earned exactly $1.03 USD for my 26 minutes of work. Hmmmmm……
Maybe that was just the setup…. Let’s break this down a bit further and see what else I can earn…
Paid Surveys
Once the surveys page is selected, I can see a list of surveys that are available with the amount of SB I will be paid for each one.
So, considering that a single swagbuck is worth approx $0.01 then even for a four-minute survey to earn $0.25 then I am going to be here a while. Let’s do the 4min survey to see how their times run:
Survey time – 6 minutes
Amount earned – 25SB ($0.25)
Each survey asks a series of qualifying questions to see if you meet the criteria of participants that the survey creators are targeting. If you don’t qualify, you earn 1SB and are returned to the front screen where you can select another survey to complete.
Shopping
In the shopping section, you can earn swagbucks simply for making purchases at local and online shopping establishments.
This is not really a time based thing but if you do a lot of online shopping on the likes of eBay and Amazon then this works just like any other rewards program. Most payments appear to be 2 or 3 swagbucks per $1 spent. SB is earned via the entry of a coupon code at checkout of via the links within the swagbucks platform.
Note: I did not make any purchases so did not earn any swagbucks here but I can see that on a couple of sites there are some high priced items such as TVs and computers. So even if you bought a $1000 TV you can get yourself about $30 worth of gift cards. Obviously this is not a sustainable way of making an income but it is something.
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Watch Videos
Earnings here are determined by the number videos that you watch.
As you can see, you even in the first set there I need to watch 15 minutes of video to earn 2SB. That equates to 8 cents an hour to watch videos. Sorry, I don’t have the time to do that.
Videos viewed – 0
Task time – 0 minutes
Amount earned – $0.00
Discover
This area looked a bit more interesting as you are essentially paid to join shopping programs etc.
I can see here that there are earning opportunities for joining the likes of Amazon, Go Daddy etc. as well as some localised television content. Looks like I can earn 200SB for joining a local streaming service. Let’s check that out…
I joined and now have 1 month to watch all the NCIS and Hawaii 5-0 I can handle and I earned 200 SB to go with it!
Programs ‘discovered’ – 1
Task time – 1 minutes
Amount earned – 200 SB ($0.20)
What were my outcomes?
Let’s be short and sweet here:
Total time spent ‘working’ in swagbucks: 60 minutes
Total amount earned: 325 SB ($3.25). That is actually less than I got on ClixSense.
How can I get paid?
With swagbuck, there are three payment options as per below:
- Giftcards: Amazon, iTunes and other localised cards (fuel etc.) – redeemable range from 100SB per dollar up to around 750. These conversions change depending on the currency that you are claiming in as well.
- Donations: You can convert your SB to donations to a number or local and international charities.
- Cash: Redeemable via PayPal – USD$1 = 100SB.
Can you make money with swagbucks?
Well yes, I earned $3.25 for 1 hour’s work so in terms of making ‘good’ money then I am not really on the side of saying “go for it”. As with many of these types of sites I think if you were willing to put a lot of time into the survey and game playing side of things then you may be able to make some from it… You could also set videos to play and go do the vacuuming too I guess (but you didn’t hear that from me).
I would definitely say that swagbucks probably provides the most value as a reward based system if you are a big online shopper. As in you can make your purchases via this platform and in time (a lot of time) you can maybe get a purchase for free with one of the gift cards earned – keeping in mind that you will have to spend approximately $1000 to get a $30 gift card.
Do I recommend it?
Look, I have to say that it looks to me that things in this area of online money making capers have not really changed from when I played around with it all those years ago. You will need to put in some decent hours to get a not-so-decent return on your time. That said, if you can earn $10 -$15 an hour from home without transport and uniform costs, then it could be worth it for some.
It is definitely not a scam and I think if you wanted to do it full time then you could almost make some almost good money from it. I would personally however suggest that you look into some other ways to earn an income online that can make you far more money for the same amount of work.
Conclusion
And there it is – my honest opinion on whether you can make money with swagbucks. I hope it has been helpful and as usual, please do not hesitate to comment below if you have any questions, need some advice or have any experiences to share.
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Until next time
Have fun
Paul
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