Something I love about the internet is all the new and interesting marketing opportunities that have been made available since its inception. Companies will dream up any new crazy method they can try to market the same things in different ways. I can imagine the conference room talk that occurred when the idea of MyPoints came about. It probably went something like,
“People don’t like to look at spam. How can we get people to look at spam?”
“Sir, what if we paid people to look at spam?”
“Its genius! Someone give this man a raise!”
Well, somehow that idea came to fruition, and it still exists today.
I’ve been a proud MyPoints member for just over 15 years now. It’s actually kind of crazy to think a website such as this has lasted this long but good on them for sticking it out. The whole premise of MyPoints is that you fill out some questionnaires about yourself and they email you “targeted” ads to your inbox. Each of those emails has a link at the bottom to take advantage of the offer. Simply by clicking on those links you start to accumulate points and those points can be redeemed for various things, but every point I’ve personally earned was applied towards restaurant gift cards, cause who doesn’t like a free meal? You earn 5 points per link you click on and many more points if you actually take advantage of the offer (which I have done on rare occasions).
The average $25 restaurant gift card runs about 3650 points at the time of this writing. That seems like a lot but keep in mind I click these links almost mindlessly at this point and when I finally reach my goal I get excited cause I know there is a free meal in my future. They ship the gift cards very quickly and I have never had any trouble with them paying out, so they have kept me as a loyal clicker since 1998. In fact, over the lifetime of my account I have earned 84,058 points. With an average rewards cost of around 3200 points (the rewards have gone up over time) they have now paid me over $650 in gift cards or about $45 per year. Not bad for spending an extra 5 seconds to click on a link once in a while.
Like many programs of this nature, there are referral rewards so if you feel like giving MyPoints a spin yourself contact me and I’ll shoot you an invite.
Earnings:
~$45 per year
