When I first heard rumors that there was going to be a movie adaption of Avatar: The Last Airbender, I seriously considered writing M. Night Shyamalan a letter asking to audition for the part of Zuko or Sokka. I was so engrossed in the series at the time that I wanted to bring it to life myself. It was a momentary passion, one inspired by the most beautiful American-made cartoon of all time -- epic and action-packed yet sincere and endearing, Avatar: The Last Airbender won the hearts of millions, many of them outside of its intended 6-11 age demographic.
Having seen the movie now, I’m glad nothing came of that plan.
I’m sure some will say that I should not have gotten my hopes up, and the truth is that I was immediately skeptical about The Last Airbender, if only because of the dubious history of franchise medium translations. I was also skeptical when I heard the project was given to Shyamalan (a director whose work I am not especially fond of) and that the film featured no Asian actors whatsoever. It’s not like I didn’t know better. Yet despite my skepticism, I held onto a sliver of hope that The Last Airbender would do the series justice. At the very least, I figured that even if it wasn’t on par with the the cartoon series, it might still make for an entertaining fantasy action flick.
Shyamalan defied even most conservative expectations by making a horrible movie by any standard, one that not even several online reviews could have prepared me for. It was the worst movie I had seen in a long time, and the words of one critic describe it perfectly: “Surely the worst botch of a fantasy epic.”
The Last Airbender is actually very faithful to the series in the sense that it changes few facts or elements of the timeline. It is unfaithful in the sense that it fails to bring its world and characters to life, or in any way channel the series’ spirit and personality. Everything from Shyamalan’s script (they let him write it) to his lamentable cast are responsible for making this happen. The opening, which attempts to set the stage for the movie, scrolls text while Nicola Peltz narrates the same words at the same time. The poor writing and noticeable mispronunciation of “Avatar” were early warning signs that my worst fears were about to come true. All Shyamalan had to do here was replicate the introduction of the series’ first episode.
The next fifteen minutes involve Noah Ringer, Nicola Peltz and Jackson Rathbone exchanging non-sequiturs, exposition and bullshit in what is some of the most poorly written and stiffly delivered dialogue in any movie that even pretends to take itself seriously:
Aang: We were forced under the water of the ocean.
Katara: Oh...I see.
Noah Ringer has no acting experience, a fact made painfully evident by this film. Nicola Peltz and Jackson Rathbone are even worse despite having some experience, and it’s obvious that they were both thrown in just because they are pretty faces. Jackson Rathbone pisses me off in particular. Nicola Peltz is at least on track with her character, though in the end she fails because of both the script and her own inabilities. Rathbone on the other hand is among the least faithful to his character, and it’s safe to say that his inclusion was part of a move to capture the horny teenage girl demographic.
Things hardly get better from there -- there are just too many things wrong with this movie, from miscast Indian actors trying much too hard to feign villainy to Shyamalan’s incompetent directing and storytelling. The script is bad enough, but Shyamalan never even has any idea where to put the camera or his actors, whether it’s during an action scene or even a conversation. The camera is too close when it needs to be back a bit, and too far when it needs to be in your face. At times, narration displaces dialogue and action entirely, which has the effect of creating huge lapses in the development of both the movie’s narrative and characters, which is already quite thin and disfigured to begin with. Much of what dialogue there is serves the purpose of exposition rather than actual interaction between characters.
No matter who got to direct The Last Airbender, one of the obvious problems the movie would have had to face is the task of condensing over 400 minutes of the series’ first season into a movie. The series engages in a lot of side-storytelling, and even if this movie had been three hours long, many of the side-stories would need to be cut. Shyamalan makes the mistake of allowing only 94 minutes for the plot and the characters to develop, and the result is that they don’t. It would have been a challenge to be sure, but the accomplishments of the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter films prove that it is not by any means insurmountable. (And Peter Jackson arguably faced a much bigger challenge than Shyamalan.) Done right, The Last Airbender should have been a three hour movie. It should have cut out some of the more incidental escapades and characters, while still allowing the principals time and opportunity to flourish, grow and live. Although, considering how The Last Airbender ultimately turned out, perhaps it’s for the best that it only runs for an hour and a half.
Shyamalan not only failed to meet his challenges; he couldn’t even get the easy stuff right. The Last Airbender is not only a bad movie; it utterly fails to even be an entertaining popcorn flick. The action is consistently unimpressive and the special effects seem as though they could have been done at least ten years ago, if not more. The soundtrack is composed with some technical skill but is conspicuously bombastic, a painful mismatch with the underwhelming fight scenes and broken storytelling. He didn’t even have the courtesy to pronounce the following names correctly: Avatar, Aang, Sokka, Iroh, Agni Kai. This is so braindead simple. I have seen some ridiculous posts floating around the Internet that these are the “real, Asian” pronunciations and that the cartoon “Americanized” them for ease of pronunciation. The cartoon is American-made, and the real pronunciations are the ones that people heard in the sixty episodes that they watched over the course of three years.
There are so many things wrong with The Last Airbender, but the absolute worst is the fact that so many people are going to see this movie and get the wrong impression. Avatar: The Last Airbender is one of the best works of fiction of the past decade, and many people will never know this simply because it is a Nickelodeon cartoon. The Last Airbender was a golden opportunity to reach out to new audiences, much in the way Peter Jackson enchanted an entirely new generation of people with The Lord of the Rings.
When you compare this movie to even just the first two episodes of the series, the cartoon has better acting, writing and fight choreography; it even has more drama. The scene where Aang enters the Avatar state for the first time in the series, when he is unconscious under water while Katara calls out to him -- these thirty seconds are more electrifying than all 94 minutes of Shyamalan’s film.
Given the fact that The Last Airbender is supposed to be only the first movie in a trilogy, there’s still time for damage control. Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko need to cut their losses, take the project away from Shyamalan and give it to a new director who will recast it entirely. The second wisest course of action would be to leave the trilogy unfinished at 33.3%.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Friday, July 2, 2010
Paid2Party and Efusjon Pyramid Scheme
I have periodically been checking the et cetera, part-time and tv/film/video sections on the craigslist job postings for potentially interesting ways of making some extra money. My most recent find was something called Paid2Party. Sounds a little too good to be true already, doesn’t it? I figured so myself, but I gave it the benefit of the doubt and called the number. I scheduled an appointment for an interview a few days later. My expectation was that it would involve handing out energy drink coupons (or tickets, as referred to in the ad) at select events and getting paid a nominal amount. In other words, I was expecting infrequent, low-paying part-time work for promoting a product.
When I arrived at the location, I walked into a bar and realized that this wasn’t exactly an interview. The door to the bar said nothing, but the two small windows beside it had images of coy fish. This was the Coy Lounge that I walked into. It was dimly lit, with chandeliers and mirrors on the wall. There were tables that each had four energy drink cans on them and the bar had several dozen cans in a display case. These cans weren’t filled with Red Bull or Rockstar. They were filled with Efusjon.
I had never heard of Efusjon before, and as I would later find out, typing it into Google would pair it with all sorts of unattractive terms, such as “scam,” “class action lawsuit,” “mlm,” and “pyramid scheme.” I have only briefly perused the web searches that came up, but it sounds as if Efusjon is already fairly well recognized as a shady operation, so it surprises me that it’s still around. Perhaps this is why the craigslist ad that I stumbled upon had no actual mention of Efusjon - to get people’s feet into the door before they even have the chance to do any research that might discourage them. In contrast to Efusjon, a Google search on “Paid2Party” will not be paired with any of the aforementioned terms, which makes it seem much safer. The Paid2Party website also makes no mention of Efusjon.
When I was sitting in the bar, listening to this guy give me his spiel, I was waiting for him to tell me about logistics and locations - what events this alleged business would be promoting at, where they were, what my responsibilities were, etc. I was never told anything like this. Instead of talking about parties, he spent nearly all of his time talking about Efusjon and complicated signups processes. It costs $30 to sign up with Efusjon as a “member.” This gives you your own Efusjon page through which people can buy their product. Any purchases made through your webpage give you a return of %4.25 of the amount spent. This is only the first level of involvement with Efusjon and it is probably designed primarily as a way of simply getting people into the door.
The real goal for them is to get you involved at least at the “associate” level, which requires you to spend $120 on Efusjon products in addition to the $30 member signup. This allows you to participate in Efusjon’s “Matrix Compensation Plan.” You can get up to three people to sign up under you, who can each get three people to sign up for them, who can each get three people to sign up for them, etc. I was told that I would get $100 for each of the first three people that I sign up, a percentage of what they make from sales, as well as a percentage of what the people they sign up make. Supposedly, you can earn commission down for 15 levels of a hierarchy, which is supposed to be lots of money that you don’t even have to do any work for. Basically, “Matrix” might as well be their substitute for pyramid, and there were times when this guy was literally drawing triangles on a dry-erase board to explain how this thing works.
There is actually a whole lot more to this, but as of this writing I do not exactly have the time to read everything I can find on this company. It seems to be pretty well established as a pyramid scheme. It is BBB accredited, but between this and The Southwestern Company, I’m really beginning to question the trustworthiness of the Better Business Bureau (not to mention their use of “better”). Efusjon does not even have its own Wikipedia entry yet.
If it seems like I’ve gotten off the track from Paid2Party, that’s how I felt when I was in this bar while this guy - who did not seem like a professional businessman - was trying to hardsell me on Efusjon. He was waxing philosophical about taking control of your personal finances and changing your life, he told me that JOB means Just Over Broke, and he said "makes sense, right?" after any explanation of some element of the Matrix Compensation Plan.
Efusjon seems well established as a pyramid scheme, but Paid2Party is something people don’t really know about yet. Paid2Party seems to be a local, San Diego-based business whose primary goal is to get people enrolled into Efusjon by giving out “free drink tickets” at parties and events, according to the craigslist ad. The first red flag I noticed was that the energy drink “tickets” were not “coupons” or anything exchangeable for an energy drink. Instead, they are referral cards to get people signed up into Efusjon’s Matrix Compensation Plan. I don’t think the guy with Paid2Party is at the top of the Efusjon hierarchy. He just seems to be another guy who has gotten into it, and is figuring out his own way to make money off of it and get more people signed up. He represents one level (or perhaps multiple levels) of this pyramid scheme, and I would say that Paid2Party is not to be trusted either.
Perhaps in the future, when I have more time, I will create a more extensive blog entry on Efusjon. For now, check out some of the following links; read carefully, cautiously and skeptically.
Related Links:
efusjon
efusjonscams
efusjon Policies and Procedures
Paid2Party
When I arrived at the location, I walked into a bar and realized that this wasn’t exactly an interview. The door to the bar said nothing, but the two small windows beside it had images of coy fish. This was the Coy Lounge that I walked into. It was dimly lit, with chandeliers and mirrors on the wall. There were tables that each had four energy drink cans on them and the bar had several dozen cans in a display case. These cans weren’t filled with Red Bull or Rockstar. They were filled with Efusjon.
I had never heard of Efusjon before, and as I would later find out, typing it into Google would pair it with all sorts of unattractive terms, such as “scam,” “class action lawsuit,” “mlm,” and “pyramid scheme.” I have only briefly perused the web searches that came up, but it sounds as if Efusjon is already fairly well recognized as a shady operation, so it surprises me that it’s still around. Perhaps this is why the craigslist ad that I stumbled upon had no actual mention of Efusjon - to get people’s feet into the door before they even have the chance to do any research that might discourage them. In contrast to Efusjon, a Google search on “Paid2Party” will not be paired with any of the aforementioned terms, which makes it seem much safer. The Paid2Party website also makes no mention of Efusjon.
When I was sitting in the bar, listening to this guy give me his spiel, I was waiting for him to tell me about logistics and locations - what events this alleged business would be promoting at, where they were, what my responsibilities were, etc. I was never told anything like this. Instead of talking about parties, he spent nearly all of his time talking about Efusjon and complicated signups processes. It costs $30 to sign up with Efusjon as a “member.” This gives you your own Efusjon page through which people can buy their product. Any purchases made through your webpage give you a return of %4.25 of the amount spent. This is only the first level of involvement with Efusjon and it is probably designed primarily as a way of simply getting people into the door.
The real goal for them is to get you involved at least at the “associate” level, which requires you to spend $120 on Efusjon products in addition to the $30 member signup. This allows you to participate in Efusjon’s “Matrix Compensation Plan.” You can get up to three people to sign up under you, who can each get three people to sign up for them, who can each get three people to sign up for them, etc. I was told that I would get $100 for each of the first three people that I sign up, a percentage of what they make from sales, as well as a percentage of what the people they sign up make. Supposedly, you can earn commission down for 15 levels of a hierarchy, which is supposed to be lots of money that you don’t even have to do any work for. Basically, “Matrix” might as well be their substitute for pyramid, and there were times when this guy was literally drawing triangles on a dry-erase board to explain how this thing works.
There is actually a whole lot more to this, but as of this writing I do not exactly have the time to read everything I can find on this company. It seems to be pretty well established as a pyramid scheme. It is BBB accredited, but between this and The Southwestern Company, I’m really beginning to question the trustworthiness of the Better Business Bureau (not to mention their use of “better”). Efusjon does not even have its own Wikipedia entry yet.
If it seems like I’ve gotten off the track from Paid2Party, that’s how I felt when I was in this bar while this guy - who did not seem like a professional businessman - was trying to hardsell me on Efusjon. He was waxing philosophical about taking control of your personal finances and changing your life, he told me that JOB means Just Over Broke, and he said "makes sense, right?" after any explanation of some element of the Matrix Compensation Plan.
Efusjon seems well established as a pyramid scheme, but Paid2Party is something people don’t really know about yet. Paid2Party seems to be a local, San Diego-based business whose primary goal is to get people enrolled into Efusjon by giving out “free drink tickets” at parties and events, according to the craigslist ad. The first red flag I noticed was that the energy drink “tickets” were not “coupons” or anything exchangeable for an energy drink. Instead, they are referral cards to get people signed up into Efusjon’s Matrix Compensation Plan. I don’t think the guy with Paid2Party is at the top of the Efusjon hierarchy. He just seems to be another guy who has gotten into it, and is figuring out his own way to make money off of it and get more people signed up. He represents one level (or perhaps multiple levels) of this pyramid scheme, and I would say that Paid2Party is not to be trusted either.
Perhaps in the future, when I have more time, I will create a more extensive blog entry on Efusjon. For now, check out some of the following links; read carefully, cautiously and skeptically.
Related Links:
efusjon
efusjonscams
efusjon Policies and Procedures
Paid2Party
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
QuickRewards.net Review
QuickRewards is one of many "get paid to" rewards sites on the Internet, meaning that you get paid to do things - clicking links, taking surveys, signing up for newsletters - online from the comfort of your own home. With these kinds of sites, there are always concerns about the legitimacy of the company and if the opportunity to make money is real. The short answer is no, it's not a scam, and yes, you really can make money by using QuickRewards. While this sounds like good news and appears to be the bottom line, QuickRewards may nevertheless not be worth your time. This review will explore most of the features of QuickRewards and give the site an overall evaluation. Additionally, it will also give a few tips on how to get the most out of QuickRewards.
A Quick Note About the Currency
This section comes first because it is important for understanding how much you earn when you use QuickRewards. Most rewards sites allow you to earn a virtual currency that can be exchanged for various rewards. Quickrewards has three different currencies:
1) Actual money, meaning US dollars and cents for American users, and I would assume (since I am American) the corresponding currencies for Canadian and UK users. Most of the bigger activities that require more commitment on your part (shopping rebates, surveys, signups) reward you with actual money.
2) QuickPoints, which are each worth one hundredth of a cent. Every one hundred QuickPoints you earn is converted into one cent. You rarely ever earn one at a time however. Instead, they are usually rewarded in bunchs of either 5, 25 or 50. This currency seems to exist so that they can reward you even less than 1 cent. Most of the less demanding site activities, such as clicks and trivia, reward QuickPoints.
3) Tokens. Unlike the previous two, this currency is not actual money and cannot be exchanged for such. It can only be exchanged for gifts. Most site activities reward tokens in addition to either cash or QuickPoints.
Daily Clicks
The first way of earning on QuickRewards is the quickest and the easiest. Simply put, there are links that you can click on, and you can earn money by doing this. Of course, since it really is that easy, the amount you can earn from daily clicks is generally small. Most of the time they reward between 10 and 50 QuickPoints and also between 1 and 5 tokens. However, as of this writing, several of the 10 QuickPoint clicks have been turned into 1 cent clicks. With this new change, it is currently possible to earn roughly 15 cents a day just from daily clicks, so this may be a good time to join QuickRewards. A post on their blog says that this is a limited time offer, but that it may become permanent if "more people are participating with the content on the pages."
Clearly, the point of daily clicks isn't just to give you money, but also to promote the sites that are being clicked on. Of course, you only need to just do the click in order to earn, and the sites that the clicks link to are rarely worth using. You can close it immediately after clicking and still earn the points. The daily video clicks even tell you that your earnings will be reversed if you do not watch the full video, but you can always just mute the video and let it play out while you do other things.
Completing daily clicks takes less than five minutes, so it's no surprise that the amount you can earn from them is very small. The current situation is actually unusual, and most of the time the amount you can earn from daily clicks is roughly 5 to 9 cents a day.
Signups
Signups are somewhat self-explanatory and somewhat not. These are a variety offers that you can earn from simply by signing up (in most cases). Signup types include sample products, credit cards, other survey sites, sweepstakes, financial services, newsletters and more. The amount you can earn depends on the type of signup and each individual signup. Most of them reward between 5 cents and 50 cents and also between 50 tokens and several hundred tokens. Some reward much more, such as 5, 10, or even 20 dollars and several thousand tokens, but these are usually credit cards or they require you to actually buy something first. Some offers only reward tokens because the respective company does not want QuickRewards giving people actual money for signing up.
Signups are my least favorite feature of the site that I actually use, but I use them very rarely. While I trust QuickRewards because it is definitely not a scam, I rarely use the signups because they link out to other sites that could potentially be scams. I only sign up for the offers that do not ask for my address, which is very few of them. I am cautious about giving out my address because I believe it is enough information for them to bill me, and I worry that I may miss some fine line in a corner of these sites, since some of them are a little shady. As a consequence, I miss out on a lot of opportunities to earn, some of which probably are legitimate, but I like to be on the safe side. On some of the occasions that I actually have done signups, I didn't always receive credit for them.
Surveys
I consider the survey section to be the best feature of QuickRewards. However, there are still many things about it that annoy me, and in the past I have even been profoundly frustrated by it. The good thing about the survey section is that it offers a regular source of earnings through daily surveys with the potential to earn extra through additional, limited-time surveys. Since surveys also require a little extra time and participation on your part, they pay more substantially than clicks. In the past there have only been three daily survey routers, but currently there are six daily survey routers, all of which reward between 50 cents and 90 cents each, and also between 200 and 750 tokens each. This doubled the potential earnings from daily surveys from approximately two dollars to over four. The limited-time surveys are sometimes worth as many as a few dollars, but they often meet their quota very quickly and are difficult to qualify for.
The bad part about the survey section is that the actual activity of qualifying for and taking surveys is laborious and mind-numbing. If you can get into an actual survey, it will usually take between five and thirty minutes to complete, but actually qualifying for a survey is quite difficult and there is never any certainty when, or even if, it will happen. You can easily spend over an hour getting screened out of surveys before you actually qualify for one. These days there are times when I can quickly and painlessly qualify for a ten-minute survey, but in the past I have spent literally hours only to qualify for nothing and earn nothing. It seems to be easier to qualify for surveys now, but it is still possible (and probable) to waste a lot of time.
This time wasting seems to occur because the process has many annoyingly designed features. For one, you are forced to attempt to qualify for only one survey at a time. Every single time you attempt you need to answer profiling questions about your age, race, marital status, yearly income, etc. and a few questions about some activity or product, the answers to which usually determine survey eligibility. If you do qualify for a survey, you will usually have to answer all of these questions again.
Second, occasionally you will be told that you "pre-qualified" for a survey. When this happens, you are simply directed to further qualifying questions and there is still a good chance that you won't qualify for the survey. I suspect they introduced this term to comfort people, but at this point I view it as a red flag.
Third, sometimes it will seem as if you are already in the survey even though you are not. It will seem this way because you have already spent a lot of time and because you have already answered many questions about your feelings and thoughts about some product or activity. I have been in situations in which I answered about a hundred questions about some product, only to be told after fifteen minutes that I didn't qualify for the survey that I thought I was already taking.
The section also just isn't organized very well on the QuickRewards site. All of the surveys are listed on a page in no real order, except for the fact that the daily survey routers are generally on the bottom. The limited-time surveys are listed, but at any given time most of them are expired. The page gives no indication about which surveys are expired and expired surveys are not removed in a timely manner.
In my experience there is also an issue with the MyView survey router. I signed up with MyView to check out their survey program and found that I could no longer do daily surveys with them through QuickRewards. If I tried to, I would simply be taken to the MyView login page. This meant that I could no longer earn money on QuickRewards for doing MyView surveys. I checked around a little more and discovered that this was only true of the computer that I used to sign up with MyView, so it turned out that it was still possible to do them from another computer. However, I could not find a way to fix this on that particular computer. I tried clearing cookies and tempory internet files, but this did not help.
I have more to say about the survey section of QuickRewards than any other feature because it is the one I have spent the most time with, much of it fruitlessly. I'm sure if someone who works for the site - or even someone who simply supports and uses the site - sees this, they will probably point out that surveys are subject to market availability, and that QuickRewards is not itself at fault for the difficulties in survey qualifying. I am not blaming them; I simply recount my own experiences taking surveys through QuickRewards to provide an honest and accurate description of what it can be like.
Shopping
While I consider the surveys to be the main feature of QuickRewards, many others view shopping as its main attraction. My guess is that it provides a decent return for the small amount of time and work it demands of users. The shopping section of the of the site has links to dozens (perhaps even hundreds) of shopping sites. By making purchases through these links, you earn back money on QuickRewards. The amount you earn is a small percentage of the amount you spend. Most are between 3% and 6%. The lowest I could find was 1% and the highest was 13%.
I have never used the shopping section because my reason for finding and using QuickRewards has always been that I wanted or needed extra cash, not that I had extra cash to spend. Another reason I don't shop through quick rewards - besides not wanting to spend money - is that my preferred online shopping store is Amazon. Shopping at Amazon through QuickRewards' will not provide any cashback. Instead, it supports QuickRewards by giving them a percentage of whatever you spend. I don't blame QuickRewards though, as I believe this is actually Amazon's policy.
There's no way around the fact that earning through shopping rebates ultimately results in losing money. Some people are obviously okay with this and accept it for what it is. So long as you the research the best prices, you might as well get some cash back on stuff you plan to buy anyway.
Paid Emails
Paid emails double as signups and paid clicks. They are called paid emails because they are emailed to you, but you can also view all of these offers on the QuickRewards site. As signups, nearly all of them reward between 25 cents and 50 cents, and I have never seen an offer that rewarded more than 50 cents. Some reward tokens only. As with the signups, I rarely ever sign up because I do not feel comfortable giving out my address to these sites. As a result, I mostly use the paid emails as paid clicks. As clicks, most of the offers give 25 QuickPoints, except for the link to local.com, which gives 1 cent. All of them say that you will only be rewarded for clicking if you do so within 48 hours, but currently this is only true for local.com. The others can be clicked each day within four or five days of posting.
Games, Polls and Trivia
I group these three items together because they are the most inconsequential and insignificant parts of the site. All three are so lazily implemented that I feel they should either be redone entirely or removed from the site entirely, because as it is the site is practically guilty of false advertising in regards to these sections. Before signing up or logging in, the front page advertises:
"Get Paid For Fun and Challange [sic] Your Brain
Take Polls, Play Games, Participate In Contests, And More..."
When you click on the polls section of the site, the only thing there is a very small line of text that says, "Game Will be back soon." To the best of my memory, this has been the entire polls section for the past year or so, and it's even possible that it has been this way for even longer than that. There is nothing to do or earn from the polls section, and it has been that way for a pretty long time now.
The games section at least has something, but what's there is pretty pathetic. Not only are these not contemporary video games with pretty 3D graphics, they aren't even the more modest flash games that can be found all over the Internet. The only "game" available currently is called "Guess My Number Game." All it involves is guessing a number between 100 and 500. That's it - that's all there is to the game, and this is currently the only game on QuickRewards. You get 1000 tokens if you're the first person to guess the correct number. After that, an additional 50 people can receive 100 tokens for guessing the correct number.
The daily trivia section is the most substantial of the three, but that's not saying much. Every day there is a "new" trivia question. "New" is in quotes here because it simply means different from yesterday. There are only a few dozen trivia questions in the trivia database, which simply rotate every day. At this point, I have already seen every single trivia question on QuickRewards multiple times, and I know not to expect one that's actually new. Most of the trivia questions are pretty easy. Some are braindead simple ("Which of these is the even number?") and the hardest ones are just a Wikipedia search away ("Which of these celebrity couples got married on May 1st?"). You get 50 QuickPoints for getting the question right, which they might as well just give away for free.
These three sections combined offer maximum potential earnings of 50 QuickPoints and 1000 tokens. Polls don't exist and haven't for a very long time; the only game takes under 15 seconds to complete; and the trivia just recycles the same few dozen questions. Contrary to what was advertised, there is barely enough here, and there certainly isn't "More."
Additional Ways to Earn
Once you log in, the main page will have a featured daily click worth 1 cent. In the past there had been three featured daily clicks, then two, and now just one. It's still an easy and guaranteed, if small, reward.
The main page also has a daily checklist. Click on the first item of this list and click on "Check This Item." Doing this will give you one token and bring you to the next item, where you can do the same thing. You do not need to actually do the activity on each page to earn these tokens; you just need to click on that link. They are basically just free tokens.
QuickRewards also has a blog, and you get five tokens a day if you make a post.
Cashing Out
This is easily the best aspect of QuickRewards, and in this respect it blows all other sites of its kind out of the water. One of the great things about QuickRewards is the fact that you earn money rather than a just virtual currency that can only be exchanged for selected gifts. This money can be converted into gift certificates at several dozen stores, online and off, but the preferred choice of many users is PayPal. Unlike other sites that mail checks that take several weeks to arrive and may get lost in transit, cashing out with PayPal on QuickRewards is secure and fast (literally days). There is no minimum for cashing out, so you can cash out with 20 dollars or 20 cents.
As mentioned before, QuickRewards does have a virtual currency (tokens). However, it is much harder to earn this way, it takes much more time and the prizes are not as good. First of all, tokens cannot be exchanged for cash whatsoever. The gifts, mostly store certificates, also require an enormous amount of tokens. To review, clicks reward between 1 and 5 tokens, and most signups reward several hundred tokens with some rewarding several thousand. Most of the token prizes cost several hundred thousand tokens. Except for the Project Linus charity donation, the cheapest item is the blockbuster rental, which costs 125,000 tokens. The most expensive is the Disneyland adult ticket, which costs 1,750,000 tokens. After using QuickRewards on and off for a few years, I only have 47,000 tokens.
The prize under the token section that I would want the most - Amazon certificates - has an additional restriction: you need to be an "Elite" member. In order to become an Elite member, you must either make five purchases or complete seventy-five daily surveys in one quarter (three months). Elite membership lasts for a quarter and can be renewed by fulfilling the requirements again. In addition to allowing access to these prizes, Elite membership doubles token earnings for the remainder of that quarter.
Conclusion
One online review of QuickRewards reads: "Looking for something negative to say and reviewers draw a blank, and that means that quickrewards.net ranks as one of the best Misc. Web Sites for survey takers." Clearly, I found quite a few negative things to say about QuickRewards and I did not have to look very hard for them. QuickRewards is probably the best site of its kind by a considerable margin, but this just isn't saying much. On its own merits, it's a functional site with several annoyances.
My earlier comment that it may not be worth your time wasn't to suggest that the site is in any way untrustworthy, but simply that there are probably better ways to spend your time and earn money. The money you make from QuickRewards is supplementary at best and insignificant at worst. This is no substitute for a paying job, not even close.
Even as a supplementary form of income, it is tedious, annoying and meager. A better way to make some extra money might be to find a local school district, see if they have adult/continuing education and teach a class. Fluent in Spanish? That's a class you could teach. These days people teach classes on how to use Facebook. You could probably even teach a class on how to start a blog. Or, try checking the part-time and et cetera sections of craigslist.
I do not exactly recommend QuickRewards. I simply wish to confirm that it is legit and trustworthy. I can only recommend it to people who are poor and desperate for every penny they can get, because QuickRewards pays mostly in pennies.
A Quick Note About the Currency
This section comes first because it is important for understanding how much you earn when you use QuickRewards. Most rewards sites allow you to earn a virtual currency that can be exchanged for various rewards. Quickrewards has three different currencies:
1) Actual money, meaning US dollars and cents for American users, and I would assume (since I am American) the corresponding currencies for Canadian and UK users. Most of the bigger activities that require more commitment on your part (shopping rebates, surveys, signups) reward you with actual money.
2) QuickPoints, which are each worth one hundredth of a cent. Every one hundred QuickPoints you earn is converted into one cent. You rarely ever earn one at a time however. Instead, they are usually rewarded in bunchs of either 5, 25 or 50. This currency seems to exist so that they can reward you even less than 1 cent. Most of the less demanding site activities, such as clicks and trivia, reward QuickPoints.
3) Tokens. Unlike the previous two, this currency is not actual money and cannot be exchanged for such. It can only be exchanged for gifts. Most site activities reward tokens in addition to either cash or QuickPoints.
Daily Clicks
The first way of earning on QuickRewards is the quickest and the easiest. Simply put, there are links that you can click on, and you can earn money by doing this. Of course, since it really is that easy, the amount you can earn from daily clicks is generally small. Most of the time they reward between 10 and 50 QuickPoints and also between 1 and 5 tokens. However, as of this writing, several of the 10 QuickPoint clicks have been turned into 1 cent clicks. With this new change, it is currently possible to earn roughly 15 cents a day just from daily clicks, so this may be a good time to join QuickRewards. A post on their blog says that this is a limited time offer, but that it may become permanent if "more people are participating with the content on the pages."
Clearly, the point of daily clicks isn't just to give you money, but also to promote the sites that are being clicked on. Of course, you only need to just do the click in order to earn, and the sites that the clicks link to are rarely worth using. You can close it immediately after clicking and still earn the points. The daily video clicks even tell you that your earnings will be reversed if you do not watch the full video, but you can always just mute the video and let it play out while you do other things.
Completing daily clicks takes less than five minutes, so it's no surprise that the amount you can earn from them is very small. The current situation is actually unusual, and most of the time the amount you can earn from daily clicks is roughly 5 to 9 cents a day.
Signups
Signups are somewhat self-explanatory and somewhat not. These are a variety offers that you can earn from simply by signing up (in most cases). Signup types include sample products, credit cards, other survey sites, sweepstakes, financial services, newsletters and more. The amount you can earn depends on the type of signup and each individual signup. Most of them reward between 5 cents and 50 cents and also between 50 tokens and several hundred tokens. Some reward much more, such as 5, 10, or even 20 dollars and several thousand tokens, but these are usually credit cards or they require you to actually buy something first. Some offers only reward tokens because the respective company does not want QuickRewards giving people actual money for signing up.
Signups are my least favorite feature of the site that I actually use, but I use them very rarely. While I trust QuickRewards because it is definitely not a scam, I rarely use the signups because they link out to other sites that could potentially be scams. I only sign up for the offers that do not ask for my address, which is very few of them. I am cautious about giving out my address because I believe it is enough information for them to bill me, and I worry that I may miss some fine line in a corner of these sites, since some of them are a little shady. As a consequence, I miss out on a lot of opportunities to earn, some of which probably are legitimate, but I like to be on the safe side. On some of the occasions that I actually have done signups, I didn't always receive credit for them.
Surveys
I consider the survey section to be the best feature of QuickRewards. However, there are still many things about it that annoy me, and in the past I have even been profoundly frustrated by it. The good thing about the survey section is that it offers a regular source of earnings through daily surveys with the potential to earn extra through additional, limited-time surveys. Since surveys also require a little extra time and participation on your part, they pay more substantially than clicks. In the past there have only been three daily survey routers, but currently there are six daily survey routers, all of which reward between 50 cents and 90 cents each, and also between 200 and 750 tokens each. This doubled the potential earnings from daily surveys from approximately two dollars to over four. The limited-time surveys are sometimes worth as many as a few dollars, but they often meet their quota very quickly and are difficult to qualify for.
The bad part about the survey section is that the actual activity of qualifying for and taking surveys is laborious and mind-numbing. If you can get into an actual survey, it will usually take between five and thirty minutes to complete, but actually qualifying for a survey is quite difficult and there is never any certainty when, or even if, it will happen. You can easily spend over an hour getting screened out of surveys before you actually qualify for one. These days there are times when I can quickly and painlessly qualify for a ten-minute survey, but in the past I have spent literally hours only to qualify for nothing and earn nothing. It seems to be easier to qualify for surveys now, but it is still possible (and probable) to waste a lot of time.
This time wasting seems to occur because the process has many annoyingly designed features. For one, you are forced to attempt to qualify for only one survey at a time. Every single time you attempt you need to answer profiling questions about your age, race, marital status, yearly income, etc. and a few questions about some activity or product, the answers to which usually determine survey eligibility. If you do qualify for a survey, you will usually have to answer all of these questions again.
Second, occasionally you will be told that you "pre-qualified" for a survey. When this happens, you are simply directed to further qualifying questions and there is still a good chance that you won't qualify for the survey. I suspect they introduced this term to comfort people, but at this point I view it as a red flag.
Third, sometimes it will seem as if you are already in the survey even though you are not. It will seem this way because you have already spent a lot of time and because you have already answered many questions about your feelings and thoughts about some product or activity. I have been in situations in which I answered about a hundred questions about some product, only to be told after fifteen minutes that I didn't qualify for the survey that I thought I was already taking.
The section also just isn't organized very well on the QuickRewards site. All of the surveys are listed on a page in no real order, except for the fact that the daily survey routers are generally on the bottom. The limited-time surveys are listed, but at any given time most of them are expired. The page gives no indication about which surveys are expired and expired surveys are not removed in a timely manner.
In my experience there is also an issue with the MyView survey router. I signed up with MyView to check out their survey program and found that I could no longer do daily surveys with them through QuickRewards. If I tried to, I would simply be taken to the MyView login page. This meant that I could no longer earn money on QuickRewards for doing MyView surveys. I checked around a little more and discovered that this was only true of the computer that I used to sign up with MyView, so it turned out that it was still possible to do them from another computer. However, I could not find a way to fix this on that particular computer. I tried clearing cookies and tempory internet files, but this did not help.
I have more to say about the survey section of QuickRewards than any other feature because it is the one I have spent the most time with, much of it fruitlessly. I'm sure if someone who works for the site - or even someone who simply supports and uses the site - sees this, they will probably point out that surveys are subject to market availability, and that QuickRewards is not itself at fault for the difficulties in survey qualifying. I am not blaming them; I simply recount my own experiences taking surveys through QuickRewards to provide an honest and accurate description of what it can be like.
Shopping
While I consider the surveys to be the main feature of QuickRewards, many others view shopping as its main attraction. My guess is that it provides a decent return for the small amount of time and work it demands of users. The shopping section of the of the site has links to dozens (perhaps even hundreds) of shopping sites. By making purchases through these links, you earn back money on QuickRewards. The amount you earn is a small percentage of the amount you spend. Most are between 3% and 6%. The lowest I could find was 1% and the highest was 13%.
I have never used the shopping section because my reason for finding and using QuickRewards has always been that I wanted or needed extra cash, not that I had extra cash to spend. Another reason I don't shop through quick rewards - besides not wanting to spend money - is that my preferred online shopping store is Amazon. Shopping at Amazon through QuickRewards' will not provide any cashback. Instead, it supports QuickRewards by giving them a percentage of whatever you spend. I don't blame QuickRewards though, as I believe this is actually Amazon's policy.
There's no way around the fact that earning through shopping rebates ultimately results in losing money. Some people are obviously okay with this and accept it for what it is. So long as you the research the best prices, you might as well get some cash back on stuff you plan to buy anyway.
Paid Emails
Paid emails double as signups and paid clicks. They are called paid emails because they are emailed to you, but you can also view all of these offers on the QuickRewards site. As signups, nearly all of them reward between 25 cents and 50 cents, and I have never seen an offer that rewarded more than 50 cents. Some reward tokens only. As with the signups, I rarely ever sign up because I do not feel comfortable giving out my address to these sites. As a result, I mostly use the paid emails as paid clicks. As clicks, most of the offers give 25 QuickPoints, except for the link to local.com, which gives 1 cent. All of them say that you will only be rewarded for clicking if you do so within 48 hours, but currently this is only true for local.com. The others can be clicked each day within four or five days of posting.
Games, Polls and Trivia
I group these three items together because they are the most inconsequential and insignificant parts of the site. All three are so lazily implemented that I feel they should either be redone entirely or removed from the site entirely, because as it is the site is practically guilty of false advertising in regards to these sections. Before signing up or logging in, the front page advertises:
"Get Paid For Fun and Challange [sic] Your Brain
Take Polls, Play Games, Participate In Contests, And More..."
When you click on the polls section of the site, the only thing there is a very small line of text that says, "Game Will be back soon." To the best of my memory, this has been the entire polls section for the past year or so, and it's even possible that it has been this way for even longer than that. There is nothing to do or earn from the polls section, and it has been that way for a pretty long time now.
The games section at least has something, but what's there is pretty pathetic. Not only are these not contemporary video games with pretty 3D graphics, they aren't even the more modest flash games that can be found all over the Internet. The only "game" available currently is called "Guess My Number Game." All it involves is guessing a number between 100 and 500. That's it - that's all there is to the game, and this is currently the only game on QuickRewards. You get 1000 tokens if you're the first person to guess the correct number. After that, an additional 50 people can receive 100 tokens for guessing the correct number.
The daily trivia section is the most substantial of the three, but that's not saying much. Every day there is a "new" trivia question. "New" is in quotes here because it simply means different from yesterday. There are only a few dozen trivia questions in the trivia database, which simply rotate every day. At this point, I have already seen every single trivia question on QuickRewards multiple times, and I know not to expect one that's actually new. Most of the trivia questions are pretty easy. Some are braindead simple ("Which of these is the even number?") and the hardest ones are just a Wikipedia search away ("Which of these celebrity couples got married on May 1st?"). You get 50 QuickPoints for getting the question right, which they might as well just give away for free.
These three sections combined offer maximum potential earnings of 50 QuickPoints and 1000 tokens. Polls don't exist and haven't for a very long time; the only game takes under 15 seconds to complete; and the trivia just recycles the same few dozen questions. Contrary to what was advertised, there is barely enough here, and there certainly isn't "More."
Additional Ways to Earn
Once you log in, the main page will have a featured daily click worth 1 cent. In the past there had been three featured daily clicks, then two, and now just one. It's still an easy and guaranteed, if small, reward.
The main page also has a daily checklist. Click on the first item of this list and click on "Check This Item." Doing this will give you one token and bring you to the next item, where you can do the same thing. You do not need to actually do the activity on each page to earn these tokens; you just need to click on that link. They are basically just free tokens.
QuickRewards also has a blog, and you get five tokens a day if you make a post.
Cashing Out
This is easily the best aspect of QuickRewards, and in this respect it blows all other sites of its kind out of the water. One of the great things about QuickRewards is the fact that you earn money rather than a just virtual currency that can only be exchanged for selected gifts. This money can be converted into gift certificates at several dozen stores, online and off, but the preferred choice of many users is PayPal. Unlike other sites that mail checks that take several weeks to arrive and may get lost in transit, cashing out with PayPal on QuickRewards is secure and fast (literally days). There is no minimum for cashing out, so you can cash out with 20 dollars or 20 cents.
As mentioned before, QuickRewards does have a virtual currency (tokens). However, it is much harder to earn this way, it takes much more time and the prizes are not as good. First of all, tokens cannot be exchanged for cash whatsoever. The gifts, mostly store certificates, also require an enormous amount of tokens. To review, clicks reward between 1 and 5 tokens, and most signups reward several hundred tokens with some rewarding several thousand. Most of the token prizes cost several hundred thousand tokens. Except for the Project Linus charity donation, the cheapest item is the blockbuster rental, which costs 125,000 tokens. The most expensive is the Disneyland adult ticket, which costs 1,750,000 tokens. After using QuickRewards on and off for a few years, I only have 47,000 tokens.
The prize under the token section that I would want the most - Amazon certificates - has an additional restriction: you need to be an "Elite" member. In order to become an Elite member, you must either make five purchases or complete seventy-five daily surveys in one quarter (three months). Elite membership lasts for a quarter and can be renewed by fulfilling the requirements again. In addition to allowing access to these prizes, Elite membership doubles token earnings for the remainder of that quarter.
Conclusion
One online review of QuickRewards reads: "Looking for something negative to say and reviewers draw a blank, and that means that quickrewards.net ranks as one of the best Misc. Web Sites for survey takers." Clearly, I found quite a few negative things to say about QuickRewards and I did not have to look very hard for them. QuickRewards is probably the best site of its kind by a considerable margin, but this just isn't saying much. On its own merits, it's a functional site with several annoyances.
My earlier comment that it may not be worth your time wasn't to suggest that the site is in any way untrustworthy, but simply that there are probably better ways to spend your time and earn money. The money you make from QuickRewards is supplementary at best and insignificant at worst. This is no substitute for a paying job, not even close.
Even as a supplementary form of income, it is tedious, annoying and meager. A better way to make some extra money might be to find a local school district, see if they have adult/continuing education and teach a class. Fluent in Spanish? That's a class you could teach. These days people teach classes on how to use Facebook. You could probably even teach a class on how to start a blog. Or, try checking the part-time and et cetera sections of craigslist.
I do not exactly recommend QuickRewards. I simply wish to confirm that it is legit and trustworthy. I can only recommend it to people who are poor and desperate for every penny they can get, because QuickRewards pays mostly in pennies.
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