“Make money the easy way! Earn $500 cash! It’s so easy, you’ll think we’re giving money away!” Puh-LEEZ.

If those pitches haven’t moved you to sign-up to start reading spam, perhaps we should have left the bold-face caps and italics. Try again: “MAKE MONEY THE EASY WAY! EARN $500 CASH! IT’S SO EASY, YOU’LL THINK WE’RE GIVING MONEY AWAY!”

Still unmoved? How ’bout: IT’S EASY, AND BEST OF ALL - IT’S FUN!

Now that you’re warmed up, here’s all you have to do to make money. As they say, it’s easy as 1-2-3:

  1. Accept truckloads of junkmail;
  2. Jump through the hoops in the junkmail;
  3. Prove you jumped through the hoops correctly.

Oh. You’re also agreeing to something along these lines: “By signing up for the Program, you are opting-in to receive our email and all third-party email we get paid to dump on you.”

Welcome to the Get-Paid-To-Read-Email (GPTRE) biz. The game where E-Mailers pay, so Opt-Inners will play. And play they do, applying for Discover cards, setting up affiliate-clone sites and turning over friends’ and relatives’ email addresses for cash and prizes.

A few of the friskier sites, along with their Alexa Traffic Rankings:

Get-Paid-To-Read-Emailer Traffic Rank Owner - Location
InboxDollars
6,050
 Cotterweb - Minnesota
E-Mail Pays U
14,493
 Gerald Peters - Texas
SendEarnings
22,984
 Cotterweb - Minnesota
Wolf Emails
58,351
???
Gain Pay
87,937
 Cai ChengFu - Taiwan

Observations:

  • InboxDollars, E-Mail Pays U, and SendEarnings were all designed by Demex Web Design of Brisbane, Australia. (What’re the odds?)
  • Wolf Emails is ubiquitous, but sounds predatory and there’s no mention of who owns ‘em. Makes us wonder what they’re hiding.

Do any Get-Paid-To-Read-Email ops really pay out? djstormrider complains on Broadband Reports:

“I don’t know any. But I know for sure who doesn’t. PaidStation.com, TimelessEarn.com (owned by same person I guess), meteor-mails.com, coffee-mails.com. I have requested payouts there months ago and… nothing… I wasn’t using my PC all summer but some of them are so stupid they are still sending me their paid mail. Do they at least sometimes remove inactive accounts?”

Javier M. Arpa shares his experience at About Get-Paid-To-Read-Email Scams. Programs Javier recommends: “None whatsoever.”

Can you find good comments about Get Rich Quick GPTRE programs? Absolutely. Google (along with many forums) is stuffed with happy links. It’s gotten so bad that some webmasters have outright banned them: “NO Affiliate programs, pyramid schemes, get paid to surf, get paid to read mail, get paid (insert any word here) programs!”

Still think you can make a killing? Have at it. Just don’t come crying to us when you can’t collect.

See Also: