Earn money from playing online games

I have to confess that I can hardly conceptualize Dungeons and Treasures as a money making opportunity (not because of the incentives, as it really pays more than most of the leggit PTC sites) but instead as a daily 30 minutes long journey to a relaxing realm far from real life problems. However, after playing for a while, you realize that this adventure game represents more than an instrument of cognitive pleasure but also a 100% free web-based platform that allows you to earn money and gifts, far from the Adsense or Adbrite blocks, PTC clicks, or referral banners.

Storyline & gameplay
The story is relativelly classical: you, the good guy, have to enter in various dungeons and destroy its denizens, while collecting treasures and sometimes catching high level monsters. And you have to do this by relying on a rudimentary gameplay system that offers few choices in respect to how individual players wish to control their character.

However, although Dungeons and Treasures lacks the fludity of the nowadays RPGs (its rudimentary turn-based actions system reminding of the now ancient Ultima Underworld I and II) the game is far from being a boring. Actually is pretty interesting and its random map generator makes every monster-hunting experience different.

Earning cash and reaching the minimum payout
Actually the minimum payout of $10 USD, payable through Moneybookers (although the implementation of Paypal in the near future was anounced) isn't very easy to reach, at least in the first days of your virtual journey.

What you should do, is what you normally do in a RPG game, except for the fact that you should avoid spending too much of your gold for equiping your character. You can get gold pieces either by finding chests in the dungeons or by selling items on the market, either by playing different games on the site (Jackpot, Treasure Hunt, Jousts, Contest Quest and others...).

Finally, you have to know that each month the characters are reset to zero and the winning golds is converted into US$ (the conversion ratio being 100.000 gold pieces= 0.33 -0.55 USD). Normally a free regular player will usually earn 10.000 or 15.000 gold pieces per day, while one that invested in upgrades somewhere between 3 to 5 times more.

The last, but not the least is the Dungeons and Treasures's referral system, an important tool you can use in order to improve the level of your daily revenues (by referring someone to the site, you gain 30% of their earnings, 15% of their earnings referral and 5% in their under referral, till april 2009).

Dungeons and Treasures screenshot gallery
As you travel the corridors of the dungeons, you'll encounter evil creatures and recover hidden treasures... (click on each of the thumbnails to see the larger image, or click here to see the whole gallery).

Earn money from asking and answering questions

PickJack.com is a relativelly new website that offers its members the possibility to earn money from answering questions and igniting multiple-choice polls. To a certain extent, pickJack.com can be conceptualized as a specific form of the famous trivia games, with the only mention that you are able to choose what questions to answer and when you answer them correctly you get some money out of this.

Needless to say, pickjack.com is a 100% free platform of gaining money online (with no investments or other supplementary costs) in which what you have to do is to create an user profile, start answering questions and creating your own polls for other users to answer them.

How exactly it works?
1. Select a question (multiple-choice) to answer.
2. After you answered it correctly, then you will see a link inviting you to submit a related question.
3. Click that link and enter your question. Create your poll and remember to add and answer link (link to a web page with more information about your question's topic) and also the link of a relevant photo. Every time you post 10 related questions you are then given the opportunity to post a Top Question (in other words, a question which is not related to another question above it, a question that will shelter a new tree of questions on the pickjack.com homepage).
4. Submit the newly created poll and that's it.

Note: Although the second step is optional, I suggest to take your time and complete it as it has a certain potential of positivelly affecting your overall ratings, and consequently your overall earnings.

Payment related aspects
Minimum payout: 5 cents, payable to your Paypal account on a fixed date (two times a month). The members are paid the exact ammount of their balance at that certain date, after which the balance is rolled back to $0.00. If the balance is less than $0.05 to get paid, it will roll over to the next payment.

Although pickjack.com's FAQ doesn't explicitelly highlight how much you will earn from referring other users to the website, it does mention that will positively affect your balance.

Potential problems
a) Sometimes pickjack.com's servers encounter severe load problems under heavy traffic.
b) Some SQL problems might not let you post a Top Question, even if you qualify for it.
c) Balances are updated every 6 hours, so you will have to be patient in order to see how much you earned during your journey on pickjack.com.
d) The earnings can fluctuate as they depend on how others rate your questions.
e) If your questions aren't accurate, are too simple or simply stupid, don't expect a good financial return (my earnings are superior to others that posted 10 times more questions than I did).

Collateral benefits
Since it doesn't take much time and effort to participate, this site would be a heaven for a veteran trivia player, as I am. Not only that I have the chances to test my knowledge, but also the opportunity to learn alot of new things, mainly due to the cultural mixture of the pickjack.com community. Consequently, it would be a site in wich I would still love to participate, even if the earnings aren't that big.

Pickjack.com payment proofs

Earn money from socializing

It was in 2005, when for the first time (since the begining of the Google hegemony) a social networking service (Myspace) was reportedly getting more page views than Google itself, and when even the last reluctant Internet marketeer joined the mainsteam chorus focused on capitalizing the devlopment of the online communities. Consequently, it was the moment when many investors, saw the potential of the business and launched their own social networking services, in order to get a piece of this profitable pie.

Needless to say, nowadays, there aren't many regular Internet users who are unfamiliar with one of the social networking services (like Myspace, Facebook, Hi5, Orkut, Bebo, Friendster, Yahoo 360, Netlog, etc). However, from this portofolio of web-based services, Yuwie is the first social service to pay its users for their activity on the site. And is 100% free.

Similar with Myspace (sometimes even too similar, as you may even find yourself forgetting that you're not on MySpace), Yuwie is an web-based social community that provides its members a large variety of ways to interact with each other, such as e-mail, instant messaging, customizabile profile, blog, photo gallery, clubs, groups and much more with the main difference, that anytime you use one of Yuwie's features or when someone else looks at your own stuff, you get paid. Being totally free to join and use, it is not a scam.

Earning activities on Yuwie.com

Earnings are generated by geting page views (having others see your profile or browsing other member's profiles, pictures, blogs, movies). In adition, changing/editing/posting items on your own profile counts as page views as well. In conclusion, the level of your earnings is tributary to how active you are (more active meaning, of course, more page views, and more cash).

More specifically, Yuwie pays you earn each time:

• Your profile is viewed
• Your pictures are viewed
• Your videos are viewed
• Your blog is viewed
• Your comments are viewed
• Your shared layouts are viewed

It’s fairly simple each time any of your pages in Yuwie are viewed you get paid for it. On top of the pageviews , Yuwie also pays you whenever you:

• Use your control panel
• Update your profile
• Add a blog post
• Upload a picture
• Message a friend.

However, probably Yuwie's most important earning feature is represented by its own refferal system as, in order to repay you for your promotion efforts, the site offers you a cut of all the page views of everyone you referred and over 10 levels of downline!

Yuwie's refferal system core is represented by the so called RSR (revenue sharing rate) a fuction that determines how much the users get paid. Each month you can check this report in your earnings section, and you will be able to accuratelly verify how many views your referral tree accumulated on each level. It will also show your earnings for each level. Here’s the actual calculation: RSR x (Page Views/1000) x Level Percentage = Your Earnings

But, let's face it, it's nice that Yuwie is paying their members back a little bit for using the site, but it's not exactly money you can live off of. So most people eventually turn to other things to supplement the earnings generated just from Yuwie alone. One of the things most people seem to be adding to their Yuwie income lately is the "pay per play" audio ads. You've probably even heard of these already. They're the short little 5 second ad snippets that play as soon as your page is loaded - but only once per page load, so as not to offend your visitors.

In conclusion, if you take into consideration all these aspects you'll start earning some income from things you normally do without being paid for on similar webistes (Myspace, Facebook, Hi5, Orkut, Bebo, Netlog, etc) which, to a certain extent, make money off your profile. If you are very active and get tons of refferals, you can expect to deliver, mothly, about 10-100$ to your
Paypal account or to get the equivalent check by mail. Although this ammount is not a fortune, it is still a decent piece of the profitable pie represented by social network services.

Yuwie payment proofs

Passive income from uploaded files

If you are an average Internet user, there are relativelly big chances that at least one time during your online journey, you either searched the www for a certain file (either a book, a software, an archive, a video clip, a music file, etc), either shared one with your coleagues, friends and family. Most of the time, when you were unable to write that particular file on a CD, DVD, memory card/stick, etc you transfered that particular file(s) through e-mail or through an instant messenger. Less often, you uploaded that file(s) to a server and only send the download link to whoever need it.

Practically, the site i'm reviewieng today is nothing but another service among those providing file storing, sharing and transferring services. Unlike many other similar websites, Uploading.com has loose restrictions when it comes to the size of the files (a frustrating limit when trying to send a file through e-mail), allowing you to upload even 100 Mb files. The main benefit would be not only that you won’t need to send the files to every single person who needs them (you would send download links instead) but the fact that each time one of your friends, coworkers or other random Internet users will download these files, you will get some passive revenues from it.

A secondary (but still important) aspect is represented by the fact that Uploading.com makes use of one of the newest high-speed and very reliable server network (that practically posses almost unlimited memory while working on multi-gigabyte Internet connections), or in other words ensuring a safe, confidential, stable and convenient environment for file storing, sharing and transferring.

If you are able to ensure enough traffic in order to get 1000 unique downloads for your portofolio of files, Uploading.com will pay you up to 20$. However, this ammount is tributary to the geographical origin of your traffic (if it originates in Russia, the incentives would be severelly affected). You can also increase your revenues by referring other members, since Uploading.com will pay you 10% of the amount earned by your referrals. If a particular user buys Premium access while using the site with your refferal link, you get an extra 20$ in your account.

The minimum payment is 30$ and is processed daily (by request) via Epese, Epassporte, Wire Transfer, Webmoney and PayPal.


How to reach the 30$ payout?
Although focusing on maximizing the exposure of your download links could be helfpful, the main element of your earning strategy should be represented by the content of the file itself. If -for instance- you upload rare movies, books, pictures, clips, documents there are many chances to easily get enough downloads in order to reach the payout.

As I said, a good step would be to post your download links on specific niche blogs, forums, groups (ex: if you upload some clip with a Hollywood actress, post the links on her fan site, etc). However, even if you don't want to promote your links, you can still capitalize downloads from Uploading.com's own community of users that continuously searches the website for specific content.

Use the Remote Upload Manager a feature which lets you upload files directly from another source (ex: youtube); practically add as many links as you want in your upload manager, then go take a walk, and after several hours your account is automatically updated.

Use the Sales Feature. Since free users are allowed to download up to 150 Mb equivalent of content, some of them might register for a premium account. The interesting aspect is that either their chosen plan, you get 50% of the uploading sales. Finally, avoid uploading files that are smaller than 1Mb, as you won't get paid for them and make sure that you have a working PayPal adress.

Uploading.com payment proofs

Passive income from uploaded pictures II (2-100$/month)

As I also underlined in the last cashscape post, ensuring a residual revenue - without any investments or suplementary costs - becomes alot easier when you capitalize some earnings from things you usually do for free, like, for instance, uploading your images to an image-hosting service and posting them either in your blog, in your website, in your Myspace, Hi5, Facebook, Orkut, etc profiles, in your Ebay offers or in various forum discussions.

Shareapic's principle, to pay its members for the exposure of their own pictures and galleries is however far from being unique in the www as being also implemented by other actors from the image-hosting sectior like, for instance, Sharedimages. Although, in essence, there are many similitudes between the incentive systems offered by the both websites, there are some aspects that create a proper climate for various, mixed opportunities to emerge.

The algorythm calculating the member's reward

If in the case of Shareapic each 1000 image views generate 0.22$/0.11$ (depending on the origin of the traffic) Sharedimages shaped a very sophisticated incentives system, adding some earning opportunities like, for instance, the number of unique viewers. The website owners evaluate the incoming traffic by splitting it into 4 geographical tiers, each category benefiting from a different incentive variable:

a) Tier I: USA, UK, Canada; Australia;

b) Tier II: Germany; France; Spain; Austria; Belgium; Denmark; Finland; Sweden; Switzerland; Netherlands; Italy;
c) Tier III: Japan; Hong Kong; Taiwan; India; Korea (Nord); Singapore; Russia;
d) Tier IV: Other states/Other regions

The payrate is variable, depending on the origin of the traffic. Click the image below to see the exact ammounts the site offers for certain geographical traffic.

Other bonuses
Signup bonus: 1$
Refferal pay rate: 10% revenue of your referrals
USD convert rate: 1500 points to 1$
Minimum Payment: 5$

Practically, this means that, each time someone sees an image a member posted either on his/her blog, either on a forum, in a Myspace, Hi5, Facebook, Orkut, Netlog, etc profile, in an Ebay presentation, the Sharedimages offers the owner of the picture some money. Interestingly, there are no limits when it comes to gallery/image promotion and anyone could use any possible means to gather traffic to his/her galleries (either through mail, instant messaging, etc).

More specifically, a Sharedimages member that generates 50000 views and 10000 unique viewers to his/her galleries (70% of your traffic being from Tier_1 countries, 30% from Tier_2 countries) would earn 8,2$ distributed as follows:

a) 6.6$ earnings from unique visitors: (50% * 10000 * 1.5 + 30% * 10000 * 0.75 + 20% * 10000 * 0.1)/1500
b) 1.2$ earnings from image views: (50% * 50000 * 0.075 + 30% * 50000 * 0.0375 + 20% * 50000 * 0.003)/1500

The level of the minimum payment
Unlike Shareapic which has a 20$ payout, the less notorious Sharedimages pays its users when they accumulated 5$.

The size and the number of images and the different rules regarding content
In contrast with Shareapic, that allows a user to upload an unlimited number of pictures, imposing no file size restrictions, Sharedimages is very restrictive as the maximum size of an uploaded image should be 1.5Mb. However there are some big advantages when it comes to the content of the uploaded pictures. For instance, at Sharedimages you are allowed to upload 18y+ (adult) images, if you label them (Not safe to work), a thing that is considered uncceptable at Shareapic.

How to reach the minimum 5$ payout?
Although harder than it seems, the only strategy you should focus on would be to maximize the exposure of your pictures and to gather alot of traffic from various sources.

a) upload your pictures on Shareapic, the copy paste the link codes to your blog, website, forum, social network (ex., MySpace, eBay, Xanga, Facebook, Hi5, Zorpia, etc). Focus on U.S. and U.K. in order to capitalize more revenues from the traffic. Make sure you check Sharedimages's traffic generators list, in order to see what sites are sending the most/best quality traffic to the site.
b) instead of sending pictures to your friends, send them the link to your galleries (either you do this through e-mail, through your instant messenger, through your group discussions
c) reffer new users, since each someone signs up with your refferal link, you earn 10% of their image views forever.
d) remember, the payments are made via Paypal, therefore you might need to open a new account to this online payment service.

In conclusion, if you take into consideration all these aspects you'll start earning some passive income from a thing you normally do without being paid for (display images on posts, blogs, profiles, etc). If you own a blog with alot of traffic or if you publish your articles or post your ideas on populated forums you can expect 10-40$/month (even more). Although this ammount is not a fortune, it can really help you to pay for your utility bills or to buy something on Internet, using Paypal.

An ideal earning combination would be to exploit the opportunities offered by both websites (for instance earn from post normal images to Shareapic, while gain revenues by posting adult content on Sharedimages).

Sharedimages.org payment proofs

Passive income from uploaded pictures (2-100$/month)

Do you display pictures on your blog or on your website? Do you upload pictures or images to your Myspace, Facebook, Hi5, Ebay, Blogger, etc profiles? Do you use images in your forum discussions? If one of the answers to the above questions is affirmative, then it is unlikely that you are unfamiliar with websites as Photobucket, Imageshack or Putfile that offer you free image-host services.

Although each of these has its own advantages, I've decided to remove my galleries from Imageshack and Photobucket to Shareapic, a free and relativelly simple to use image hosting service (actually, you need only 2-3 clicks in order to host your images online, to create galleries and to post them in your blogs, in forums, in your social network's profile).

The decision to move my images was dominated by Shareapic 's commercial policy, namely to reward its members, everytime someone views the pictures she/he uploaded to his/her blogs, to his/her website, to his/her Myspace profile, to his/her Ebay account, to his/her Facebook or Hi5 profile and the list goes on and on. Even more the user can promote the links to his/her images even through his e-mail signature.

Needless to say, this is a great way of earning passive income, that you wouldn't have normally done using many of the other image hosts.

How to reach the $20 payout?

First thing to keep in mind is the fact that Shareapic pays you $0.22 per 1000 pic views (actually more than the ammount paid by some major advertising networks to their publishers). Therefore your strategy will focus on exposing your pictures to people.

a) upload your pictures on Shareapic, the copy paste the link codes to your blog, website, forum, social network (ex., MySpace, eBay, Xanga, Facebook, Hi5, Zorpia, etc).
b) instead of sending pictures to your friends, send them the link to your galleries (either you do this through e-mail, through your instant messenger, through your group discussions
c) take advantage of the fact that at Shareapic you can upload unlimited pictures, that there are no file restrictions and you can create unlimited galleries
d) use your Google Adsense code to your image and gallery pages
e) reffer new users, since each someone signs up with your refferal link, you earn 10% of their image views forever.
f) remember, the payments are made via Paypal, therefore you might need to open a new account to this online payment service.



In conclusion, if you take into consideration all these aspects you'll start earning some passive income from a thing you normally do without being paid for (display images on posts, blogs, profiles, etc). If you own a blog with alot of traffic or if you publish your articles or post your ideas on populated forums you can expect 10-40$/month (even more). Although this ammount is not a fortune, it can really help you to pay for your utility bills or to buy something on Internet, using Paypal.

Shareapic.net payment proofs

Earn money from discussions (5-30$/month)

Even if mylot.com remains probably one of the best pay-to-post websites of the World Wide Web, it's financial efficaciousness might trigger certain frustrations in the case of the people that want a faster, but still 100% free (no investments or other upgrading costs) way to earn online money. Most of those that master English language at least at an intermediate level ciao.com plays the role of the most attractive alternative, while the others have to cope with a more limited portofolio of options.

A good alternative would be the discussions forum sizeofpaper.com which - despite of functioning on a non-ergonomic and hard to exploit interface - is among the few legitimate paid-to-post sites in the www. Although the discussion's portofolio in sizeofpaper.com is not as broad as in the case of mylot, the financial earnings are superior to those offered by the latter (actually a Microsoft's company):

Paid actions and the level of the earnings

- 0.01$ for each discussion ignited by you +0.001$ for each word in the initial post, up to the limit of 30 words (an initial post of 30 words would be evaluated with 4 cents, or $0.04)
- $0.005 for each answer you post to someone else's discussion +0.001$ for each word in the post, up to the limit of 30 words (an initial post of 30 words would be evaluated with 3.5 cents, or $0.035)
- $0.001 for each answer posted by other members to the discussions you ignited
- $0.30 for each refferal that posts 10 answers/discussions on the forum

Specific aspects (requests, limitations, etc):

a)unlike in the case of ciao.com and mylot.com, in the case of sizeofpaper.com you can earn fast money even if you master the English language at a begginer level.
b) you need to be patient - the money aren't accumulating very fast, but you are able to use copy/paste in order to offer refferences, quotes, study conclusions that might support a certain claim or which might help you shape your discussion hypothesis.




What you should know before and after you become a sizeofpaper.com member?

1) The length of a post is relevant - the one word contributions aren't helpful if you plan to reach quicly the minimum payment level. Try to post answers or to ignite discussions that are at least 30 words long.
2) The payments are made via Paypal, therefore you might need to open a new account to this online payment service.
3) Don't buy your own illusions that you will reach the minimum payment (20$) in less than 2 months.

Another means of earning money on the forum

a) the site has a section for articles, paying $0.50-$10 for each accepted article.
b) many forum users/moderators/admins pay the members for various jobs (design, programming)
c) the forum has a section destined to external earnings where blog owners, marketers post various information about earning opportunities.
d) as in any other pay-to-write atracting new members through your refferal link generates some income (each new active refferal, that wrote 10 posts brings some cents to the one that invited him/her on the forum)

How to reach the $20 payout?

1. ignite 5-6 discussions/day by focusing on some global interests (money, blogging, seo, software, sites, etc) but make sure the post has a lenght of at least a 30 words (each discussion might generate 13-22 cents)
2. answer 20-30 discussions/day, again the answer should have at least 30 words
3. optionally get some refferals

In conclusion, if you follow these steps you'll start earning 1-5$/week relativelly easy. When you'll be more familiarized with the site you'll be able to reach 10-40$/month (even more). Although this ammount is not a fortune, it can really help you to pay for your utility bills or to buy something on Internet, using Paypal. Overall, from a financial point of view (earnings/time spent) sizeofpaper.com es is superior to mylot.com but inferior to ciao.com.

Sizeofpaper.com payment proofs