According to their website, SwagBucks.com is a “loyalty program” where you can earn prizes for doing the same stuff you do online everyday.
Shopping, watching videos, searching for products, playing games; all of these things and more can earn you prizes with the Swagbucks system.
How Does Swagbucks Work?
It may be confusing to understand why a company would pay you to just do “anything” online. But companies understand that the average American actually spends quite a lot of time on the internet, and that what people do online says a lot about their interests, habits, likes and dislikes.
If companies know what kinds of games people play or what kinds of products and advertisements catch their attention, it goes a very long way towards helping companies understand how to better reach their target market. Companies all over are discussing the benefits of understanding exactly how and why we do the things we do online.
So, Swagbucks will give you prizes in exchange for “doing what you already do online” because they are taking that information and providing it to others, who will use it to change and influence the way they do business online in the future.
What Is a “Swagbuck”?
Swagbucks, unlike other pay to search sites, does not compensate their members with money. Instead, they give them various amounts of points, called Swagbucks, for the tasks and activities they do online. At any point in time after you have begun collecting these Swagbucks, you can go to the Swag Store and exchange them for items.
One of the issues with Swagbucks is that they do not maintain a set rate of pay for activities. The pay changes as certain demands for information changes. However, keep in mind that you are still simply getting paid for activities you would be doing regardless, so though it may be frustrating, it’s still not a bad deal.
You also have the option of turning your Swagbucks into cash, but customers report that you get less bang for your Swagbuck when you make this choice. It takes more Swagbucks to get cash paid directly into a PayPal account then it does to simply redeem them for a gift card of the exact same value. This goes back to Swagbucks’ partnership with various companies, but luckily for their members these partners tend to be large vendors like Amazon.com and Wal-Mart, places where you are likely to spend your money anyway.
Tips for Earning with Swagbucks
- Take advantage of the referral system. When you refer someone, Swagbucks will reward you with matched earnings up to 1,000 points. The more people you refer, the easier and faster you’ll rack up Swagbucks.
- When you use the Swagbucks search, be normal. Swagbucks is recording your searches, and if you are continuously entering gibberish like “aldkjfa;ldkj” and hitting the search button, you won’t be a member for long.
- Take advantage of the Swagbucks “extras.” Once a day, they’ll have special offers for you to look at that will take a couple seconds. Or submit poll ideas. If yours is chosen, you earn more.
- Use their toolbar, and better yet, use Swagbucks. For everything. The whole point of the system is that they want to know what you are doing online. The more you use it, the more they benefit, and the more you will earn.
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And swagbucks people will not help me anymore!!! They used to help me all the time (without screenshots I might add), but now they just keep saying all the issues are on my end because everything works for them! Absolutely not true or I think I'd be noticing how the internet sucks these days and won't load anything and I can't watch vids anymore. But no, it's just the swagbucks site that's messed up, the rest of the internet is running as it should.
And as far as NOT GETTING PAID for doing surveys now....they used to ALWAYS help and give me my missing swagbucks.....but, not anymore. Now I have to take a screenshot (there is never one to take though because I'll be doing the survey and then the NEXT button will just take me to the home page, or to a 'you don't qualify', or some other bullshit page that is pointless to take a screenshot of because it doesn't show that I was just kicked off a survey that I was basically finished anyhow (just answering the 'where we classify your answers' questions).
In conclusion, I think Swagbucks is a legalized scam site with super shitty business ethics and if they don't want us making so much money off them, they should stop advertising like that is all they are there for.
Their pages are massively clogged up and crash all the time. Generally right when you are about to finish a survey or a group of videos. They have a banner that claims that you can earn up to 500 Swagbucks a day just for watching videos. They used to have groups of videos (usually 20) that you could get up to 10 Swagbucks (if they work) those have now been lowered to 3 SB. Some of the travel groups exceed 2 hours. Whoever thinks 2 hours, an hour or even 15 minutes of your time is worth $.03 then I guess it's a deal. How can you possibly earn 500 Swagbucks in a 24 hour period when they are no more than 3 SB for a group of 20 videos.
Let's say each group of 3 SB videos are 30 mins (most are more, few are less), you would have to watch 166 groups of videos which is 4,980 mins which is 83 hours! If you sit there and click each one after 45 seconds and somehow manage to defy time, congratulations you just spent a day earning the equivalent of $5!!!People brag that they took all day to earn 100 Swagbucks. That's a dollar people. Seriously? If you are stuck at home by all means do some of these and get some gift cards. If you jump through their hoops everyday for a month (did I mention they raise the goal if you consistently reach the goal? They go from 40 up to over 100 SB that you have to earn a day) you get awarded 300 SB. $3 for being glued to your computer for hours a day. Watching the same videos. Playing the same games that barely run. If you have to screenshot EVERY offer you do and send it to customer service and jump through hoops for 150 Swagbucks you might as well go work in China.
Swagbucks is honest and pays great
by the time i'm done writing this it will be 1700 there it is now
They always ask for an address to make sure your account is connected to a real person. The online gift cards do work. Use them for gifts.
Everything is explained completely on the site. No there is stuff I do not like, but being a scam is not true. Just have to work harder and making sure you know what your actually getting by reading all the fine print.
I have and I work it the way it suppose to be.
I have gotten one $25 Amazon gift card, however, and have points for a couple more. We'll see how this goes -- I just want to accumulate a decent war chest for some book buys later this year.
But I have noticed that it's getting harder and harder to qualify for a survey -- and as often as not, they ask you maybe 10 minutes worth of questions, then disqualify you without even a couple points as consolation prize.
This is just shoddy business. I'm going to see how the next couple weeks goes, and then probably cancel.