Get Paid To ... (GPT)

I mentioned paid to click (PTC) and paid to read (PTR) sites as a money making option in my last post. These are more generally referred to as "get paid to" (GTP) opportunities and include get paid to ... sign up, search, and post, as well as some more innovative ideas. MsFit has a nice sampling of current such opportunities at:

• http://cashquests.blogspot.com/
  

I haven't been able to bring myself to sign up for any PTC sites, but you can get a good feel for the current state of the market by reading the discussion forum:

• http://www.talkptc.com/
  

As JB mentioned, the average wage is $0.0025 per click. Many sites advertise "up to" $0.01 per click, but actually have many ads (to click) at much less than the average. The average number of paying ads to click per site is around 10 per day (I saw as low as 4, and as high as 65 mentioned), for a grand total of $0.025 per day. There seem to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 at least somewhat legitimate sites, although judging from reports at Talk PTC, sites south of the top 30 have an increasing chance of simply ceasing to exist one day along with any accumulated earnings. This is particularly irksome as most have minimum payout thresholds (e.g., $0.50-$10.00, average $2.00).

So, a particularly diligent clickworker, clicking every ad at each of 50 sites every day, could accumulate, say, $1.25 per day, or $37.50 per month. Even at, say, an hour a day, this is not well paid work. Many sites pay a commission for referrals (e.g., 5%-100%, average 15%), so someone with 7 referrals, each just as diligent, could perhaps accumulate $75 per month (note that this would not exceed the minimum payout threshold when averaged over the 50 sites).

The site owners make money by selling clicks to advertisers and upselling the clickworkers. Some clickworkers upgrade to paid memberships in order to earn more per click and other bonuses, including higher commissions from referrals. It seems that seasoned clickworkers do in fact buy these upgrades from the longer-lived sites.

Advertisers tend to be affiliate marketers and the like. With "splash" pages designed to get the viewer to click for more information in the under 5 seconds of attention that they've bought. I can't imagine buying this sort of advertising myself, particularly because of the persistent issues that the PTC market has with your "viewers" ending up as bots.

To sum, I'm not sure even the site owners are getting a reasonable return on their time investment. All but a handful are constantly changing ownership. I personally don't think that even the $75 month scenario is achievable. It is one thing to have your downline signup at 50 sites, it is another to have them reliably visit each of those 50 every day for $1.25. Maybe if some thousands of people had already paid you $49.95 for the priviledge of being allowed to signup as part of your downline on these sites ... but that is a post for another day.