Tis the Season for Payouts! While Others Pay, I AM Paid!

Tell someone that you are getting paid to view advertisements and they look at you strange!  You know, like you should go back to that hole you crawled out of, take another nap, and perhaps wake up a “normal” person again.  Many of these same people however, will pay without thinking twice to see ads on TV and in their favourite newspaper or magazine.  If their favourite newspaper or magazine went online and installed a paywall, they gladly pay for continued access to their preferred publication, ads and all.

These same people take part in social networks, forums, and other online social sites where advertisers make money from targeting users by how they interact on the site.  Do the users ever see a dime of that money?  Do they ever get compensated for contributing to the demographic data that got the advertiser their sale??? NO!  But they will waste no time scoffing at anyone who thinks they can cash in on the bounty.

Well, I wanted to give an update on the income trickle I have going all by my little self right now.  That’s another thing people scoff at, and I have to admit, at one time I was in this group of scoffers myself.  The real estate franchise owner would make no money if realtors, who get paid commission only, weren’t selling houses.  The owner of the car dealership would make no money if his salesmen, who are only paid commission, weren’t selling cars.  Your local grocery store would not make any sales if they didn’t have staff opening doors, stocking shelves, and customers buying during business hours.  I actually saw someone scoff that the only way money was being made in one company was because of relying on others to make sales. . . Hmmm. . . run that by me again???

You see, advertisers are businesses, corporations, non=profit organizations, causes, cottage industry and home-based businesses all trying to reach those who want their offerings.  They are taught in marketing courses to go where their target market hangs out and purchase advertising there.  The concept of banner advertising on traditional-styled websites is just so much noise now on the page.  People don’t complain about it unless it gets too “in their face”, but neither do they interact much unless the ad is touting something they were searching for on Google Amazon or Facebook just minutes or hours earlier.  This type of ad-tracking is done via cookies.

So if banner advertising has become so ubiquitous that people don’t pay it much mind anymore, how else do they get word out about their offering?  They turn to online versions of old offline standby’s.  The unaddressed ad mail that now tends to hit the recycling bin before it hits the house has been respawned online as the safelist/viral mailer.  The difference?  People actually sign up to receive these emails so that they in turn can send out emails of their own.  It’s a captive audience, although similar to unaddressed ad mail, if your subject line fails to grab attention, it can be good money after bad if you purchased an ad pack to do the sending.

But the thing is, people DO buy these ad packages.  The visual noise of ads in the magazine has respawned online in the form of traffic exchanges where people choose to sign up to view these ads in exchange for their own ad being viewed by others.  It’s a bit of a “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”.  Again, ad packages can be purchased and such packages are advantageous to those who don’t have time to sit there scrolling through ad after ad to earn the credits to send out their message.

The theme across all these various advertising iterations, is the concept of real human beings.  Google has occasionally suffered terrible bouts of click-fraud on the adword ads on their search engine.  Safelist/viral mailers and Traffic exchanges suffer from programmed bots to do the clicking for people as well, but captchas are put in place to reduce the abuse of the system, making it quite viable for most people using these services.

When an ad or an email crosses a person’s desk who happens to be looking for the product being offered, that advertiser has gained a customer.  They’ve made a sale.  There are literally 100’s of these sites around the ‘net, and most of them are similar to your offline advertising in that they don’t pay anyone for the time they spend viewing or sending their advertising.

I am happy to say however, that sites are coming along who pay you for the ads you click and the emails you open.  Even browsers are starting to get in on the act with paying you for your time by installing tiny miners to make your device pay for itself finally.

One of the sites where I click ads to earn a penny or two, is BTCClicks:

2019-01-24 payment proof BTCClicks

BTCClicks pays a certain number of satoshi with every ad you click.  Most of the time this earns you at least 100 satoshi per day, with payout at 10,000 satoshi.  As you can see in the screenshot to the left here, BTCClicks has paid me a number of times now.  The ads I click are paid for by other members who have bought ad packages at BTCClicks.  As a free surfer, I get paid to view those ads.

 

coinbulb payment proofsCoinbulb is similar to BTCClicks, but up until Fall 2018, they had fewer ads on their system.  Their ads were generally higher-paying, but because they were fewer, it took a long time to get my first payout.  Since Fall 2018 however, they’ve added to their site and you’ll notice the second payout came much faster!

A traffic exchange I joined in August 2017, InfinityTrafficBoost, has paid me three times now as of February 2019.  They offer 11 different ad packages aimed at the desired number of views an advertiser wants for their product or service.  Payouts for them seem to be getting closer together as well.  Click the link above to see three different payout screenshots.

bitter.io 2 payment proof

Similar to BTCClicks and Coinbulb, Bitter.io came on the scene offering a plugin for your browser that would let you earn by surfing ads on their site.  They’ve paid me twice so far, and probably would have paid me again already if I was more dedicated to clicking the ads in their list.

I am doing a fair bit of my earned ad viewing now on a browser that honestly makes my 12yr old system work so much faster online!  That browser is CryptoTabBrowser, and it is a version of Chrome that has been optimized to be up to 8x 10x faster (as of April 2019) than Chrome itself while also mining in an open tab on your computer, using CPU power rather than the GPU resources typically used by mining farms.  CryptoTabBrowser’s cashout is at a mere 1000 satoshi, and so far takes not quite two months is speeding up as they make improvements as you’ll see in this screenshot.

I’ve been paid once so far from AdFeedz, and thanks to getting in while it was free to do so, I’ve been paid once by HashingAdSpace too, just waiting on that payment to go through as I type this. HashingAdSpace breaks the train in this thread, as going forward as of March 1/19, no one earns for free, you have to buy ad stakes to do any earning. EDIT:  Currently, a single Asimi stake will cost roughly $125 USD as of March 4/19.  However, that stakes lasts a year, and your funds will be “earned back” 6 months or less, depending on how your daily ad minting goes, and whether or not you reinvest your earned Asimi to earn funds faster.

It’s been a great week starting the beginning of March 2019, as several of these payment proofs show cashouts all since the previous week.  My wallet over at Freebitco.in is seeing regular increases in the daily interest my balance is accumulating!  If you need a legitimate BTC wallet that honestly earns you interest, head over to Freebitco and get your deposit address.  Put that address into every payment system you get cashouts from and after you’ve accumulated 30,000 satoshi, you’ll start to see interest accrue.  No need to play any of the games there or even to use the faucet on the main page.  Just use the wallet for your sending and receiving.  When you need to spend your BTC, check out this incomplete list for ways you can use your cryptocurrency as currency!

I spend anywhere from 2 to 4hrs per day at these sites, pairing the free-to-surf sites with non-earning advertising sites so that my time spent advertising my business and such is earned by other sites that pay me.  Imagine what those payment proofs would look like if my scoffers were workers instead?

Income for Nothing: The Myth vs Reality

When it comes to sources of income that you don’t have to lift a finger for, 99.9% of them don’t work. None of the remaining sources provide a livable wage when engaged in alone, and extremely few actually follow through on their effortless promise.

Among those extreme few are the following three BTC earning methods:

If you have no BTC and want to earn it slowly but surely with no effort on your part, begin with either or both of these first two:

QoinPro: 
QoinPro will let you earn a tiny amount of BTC as well as a number of other digital coin, every day with no effort on your part. They went down for a few months due to a drastic redesign and a new app they were building for your phone. But they are back up now and those of us with prior accounts still have them, and our referral links still work. :-D

Earnings since signing up a year ago August 2017:QoinPro Earnings

CryptoTabBrowser: 
Using this browser, you can surf faster than Chrome itself, while making your PC or laptop earn its keep. On my 12yr old Windows PC, this particular browser actually works better than either Firefox or Opera and those two already work better than Chrome on my system.

Earnings since installing in August:CryptoTabBrowser Earnings

NOTE: These earnings were wiped out after an extended period of time where I was not logged in with my gmail acct due to recaptcha issues needing me to delete cookies all the time. When I installed the new mobile browser for CTB and then logged in, my earnings disappeared so I am starting over. We’ll see if a support ticket brings back the above earnings or not. Just like syncing your phone with Outlook, there is a right and wrong way to do it without wiping out your contacts. In my case, I think I wiped out prior earnings.

Freebitco.in: 
If you already have a bit of BTC in a wallet gathering dust somewhere, and it totals at least 30,000 satoshi or more, transfer it to your very own wallet at Freebitco.in and earn daily interest on your BTC savings! I’m at roughly 50,000 satoshi at the time of this writing, and earning roughly 60 satoshi in interest per day without doing anything to earn it.

Interest earned since April 2017:Freebitco.in Interest Earnings

QoinPro and CryptoTabBrowser are both good introductions to the concepts of digital coin and mining. QoinPro’s revamp included adding a full-fledged wallet, so that you can send as well as receive coin to any of the digital coins activated on your account. This feature is on their current roadmap, thought not yet implemented. Previously, you could only send to that wallet, now you will be able to send from it as well. This is good, because this wallet, like most of the others out there, does not earn you interest while you save. That is what Freebitco.in’s wallet is for. As you can see in the interest screenshot above, the daily satoshi earned is small on my 50,000+ satoshi amount, but it is almost three times the amount earned if I just use the free tab of the same site. So it’s as if I get three free rolls without having clicked the “roll” button. I like the idea of daily interest, so this is where I keep my BTC when I am not using it.

Earnings at each of these site are small, but paid to the user regardless. If you want these sites to pay you a more livable amount, you actually DO need to DO something! It’s called marketing and promotion! Due to how many people out there seem to only want money rolling in without putting in any effort, theoretically, your marketing and promotion efforts should net you quite a good following. The larger the following, the better so that your rewards for bringing in new affiliate members starts to grow. Do note that because everyone wants something for nothing, it will largely be YOU doing all the work, but conversely, it will be YOU that benefits more than the others precisely because you did all the work.

In other words, while you CAN get something for nothing, it is a very small something. None of these sites expect you to pay to earn from their services. So no worries about spending money you might not have. But in exchange for not spending any money, you may wish to consider spending time and effort instead.

Finding locations where your message about these sites will be heard, means a level of observation that you might not be used to if this is your first time delving into marketing and promotion. Facebook used to be the go-to place for advertising, but now that free efforts there get squashed under paid efforts rather badly, I can no longer recommend it. We’re putting out effort here, not money remember. You may still get eyeballs on your offers in various affiliate, networking, and online business groups on Facebook, but be warned, posting the same thing too often can land you in FB jail for a time until they let you start posting again.

Other online locations where you can spread the word include Pinterest, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. However, social networking doesn’t work for everyone. In those cases, it is time to head over to safelists/viral mailers or traffic exchanges. I recently wrote a blog article about yet another experience doing a mass send out from over a dozen mailers vs ongoing efforts at my favourite traffic exchange. You can read about that here. Incidentally, the two services linked in that article are what I strongly suggest you sign up to use to begin with. Other traffic exchanges do exist out there, but stay away from the auto-surfers. The convenience offered to you of just starting it and leaving it while you go away and do something else, means that not only are YOU not paying other member’s ads any mind, your ad won’t be paid any mind either. So if you’re going to put effort into these free methods of earning money, you want that effort to be wisely spent.

Classified ad sites, banner ad sites, particularly those that offer a form of affiliate system themselves such as:

can also work when it comes to promoting your free earning sites. You just need banners for the banner sites and sometimes square banners for the classified ad sites too. Some sites offer these already in their referral tools area, most don’t and you may have to create them in a graphics program on your own machine.

You decide how much time and effort you put into these sites that send you digital currency for no money, no time, and no effort directly on their programs. This article is simply here to say that yes, these sites do exist, you can earn and they do pay. But the earnings are small unless you at least invest time and effort promoting them.

toolbox

Introduction to Faucet Alley – One Way to Enter the World of Bitcoin!

bitcoin faucetAs discussed in my first blog article on bitcoin, using faucets to earn your way into the world of bitcoin is not for the faint of heart and requires both a technician’s mindset and a worker’s mindset if you are to do what I did, which was earn $3 USD or 0.003+ BTC in the space of two months WITHOUT REFERRALS! Because of the large number of digits following the decimal, earning 0.003 is no small feat when we’re talking faucet earnings.  Most people in the bitcoin world don’t think this is a wise way to spend your time.  However, I proved to myself that for the person short of cash, it is a viable way to earn bitcoin in your spare time.

Before you consider entering the Faucet Alleyway, stop and take stock!

You MUST  NOT:

  • be easily swayed by advertising!
  • be easily confused by lots going on!
  • insist on waiting for every page to load before deciding if it’s good or bad
  • be computer-illiterate!
  • have tunnel-vision!
  • be slow-moving!

If you are going to venture into the faucet alley-way, you absolutely MUST:

  • be laser-focused!
  • be aware of what’s going on with every tab you have open!
  • Understand the basic parts of a browser and make heavy use of them!
  • Ignore advertising!
  • Learn quickly!
  • Understand typical malware behaviour and spot it fast!
  • Be able to clean your own machine of malware or have plenty of cash to pay someone else to clean it for you on occasion.
  • have quick reflexes with mouse and keyboard!

toolboxYour toolkit MUST include:

  • browser other than MS Explorer
  • plugin/add-on to block unwanted content not allowed in your home
  • up-to-date antivirus program
  • Ccleaner set to delete history and cookies as well as clear the DNS cache and old prefetch data.

How’d you do with your self-assessment and computer readiness?  If you ARE any of the “MUST NOT” items, this pursuit may not be for you.  Moving forward will put both you and your computer at a level of risk you may not be able to recover from.

However, if you are confident you are not affected by the “MUST NOT” list and confident you can handle the “MUST HAVE” list, and your computer is set up to handle the required toolkit, then let’s move forward.

The important thing to understand is that this is WORK!  Don’t sit down to my list of faucets thinking you are engaging in a leisurely activity.  This is anything but leisurely!  Boring perhaps at times, tedious at other times, but leisurely it is NOT!  You have to be on your toes constantly! Your computer’s security can’t be allowed to lapse either. This is because a jaunt down Faucet Alley is akin to swimming with sharks.  Some are friendly, some ignore you, and some come at you with teeth bared and eyes blazing! One of the faucets in my list is a bit of a nasty shark and I honestly wonder at the way the owner has chosen to make money off his site.  I have learned to handle the onslot this faucet delivers at times, but I don’t recommend visiting if you are lax or negligent in ANY of the MUST HAVE/INCLUDE lists above!  If you are not necessarily wary of what might jump out at you AND prepared to handle it the moment it happens, DON’T GO THERE!

Secondly, you need to understand this takes TIME!  Want to make money doing faucets??? You need to be religious about claiming as often as each site will let you! Of course you have a life to live away from your computer and perhaps you have other tasks you need your computer for as well, so don’t visit Faucet Alley all day long!  But when you do sit down to work the faucets, try to have several hours available at a shot.

Thirdly, all those ads you are seeing are paying the site owner so they in turn can pay you!  Don’t use an ad blocker!  Having said that, it is wise to have a plugin that blocks unacceptable content that goes against your family values, but don’t block ALL ads as a general rule.  Most faucets have a check built into them whereby if they notice a trend of ads being blocked, they will eventually “stop working” until you enable ads again.  Now if a site’s ad networks insist on showing you offensive ads regardless of your filter’s settings, put the site into quarantine for a few hours using the Brave browser.  If the site “stops working” open it back up in your favourite browser and see if the offending ads are gone.  If they are, continue on as normal.  It is precisely because of these ad networks being less than family-friendly at times, that life for the faucet earner can get so dangerous.  In fact, I recommend doing it in a location or at a time when impressionable eyes and ears are not present, to protect them from the visual or audible dangers that lurk around some corners in this alley way.

stop-dontgoOne of the rules of thumb I learned very early on my career as a computer repair technician, is that about:blank in a browser’s address bar can spell trouble, particularly for Internet Explorer.  About:blank has been taken advantage of by numerous drive-by installation threats dropping backdoor trojans, worms, rootkits and other nasties onto people’s computers.  This is one reason for the sharp eye paying attention to everything going on with laser focus ignoring the ads!  In my experience, allowing your antivirus scanner to scan links wreaks havoc with the various captcha codes you need to solve, particularly those that tell you to click images until there are no more.  Each image sent to you in that grid is a link that has to be scanned by your AV link scanner.  It’s better to develop a sharp eye for trouble than to bog down your computer with so many link scans, especially if you use my method for earning satoshi via faucets.

If you see about:blank show up, it will be there for one of three reasons:  1) Slow connection to the next page being loaded.  Many faucets use pop-overs and pop-unders.  These are full pages not merely pop-ups in small windows.  If a server is slow in delivering the site destination, a threat could be on it’s way.  2) The site being loaded is the one you were just at because now the page you were on has become a pop-under and your original site needs to reload.  Watching your address bar change from about:blank to another site address and having your mouse over the tab’s x button will help you discern if you are reloading the page you want, or having to close a tab you don’t want.  Eventually you will learn when a pop-under has just taken place, or a pop-over, and in the case of several of the faucets in my list, you can get both happening at the same time, meaning you close the left-most, right-most and leave the center tab loading in the little threesome that suddenly developed.

Be sure as well to go through your favourite browser’s security settings.  Set all plugins or addon’s to “ask me” so that you get a heads up if anything strange wants to take place.  I have Firefox set to prevent requests to install programs, and one of the faucets in my list regularly tries to ask permission to install something!  Not good!  This same faucet will at times try to force its way onto my system with spawning pop-unders.  Due to this behaviour, I’ve had two threats successfully get onto my system and I had to shut down my computer the hard way before beginning clean up in safemode.  Again, if any of this sounds way over your head, you might not want to be earning satoshi via Fauce Alley!  The number of faucets that use such tactics is fairly large it seems.  Knowing how this one faucet behaves periodically, I can spot other problem faucets very quickly and will not frequent low-paying faucets who behave in this manner.  The only reason I tolerate this particular faucet is because of how well it pays on an ongoing basis.  I rarely have to quarantine the site, and my filter catches most offensive material it’s ad networks might try to show.

Because browser-based threat delivery often ends up in temporary file locations such as browser caches, having a tool such as Ccleaner on hand can help with the clean-up.  Run this tool fairly frequently when you follow my faucet claiming method, but also use it in safemode whenever you have to clean-up after a threat that landed on your system.  Follow up that cleaner with a scan by Malwarebytes free or pro, then boot back into normal mode and carry on.  Mac and Linux users, I’m not sure how you’d do this on your OS’s, but I’m sure some well-deserved research could do you some good in this regard.

If I haven’t scared you off good and proper from this form of earning satoshi, then let me share what I’ve enjoyed about this form of obtaining bitcoin:

Travelling around the world from the comfort of your computer chair!  That’s right.  The reCaptcha codes that many faucets ask you to complete are pictorial in nature, and come from literally all over the world.  You’ll see street signs in various languages, storefronts from towns and villages in locations you’ve never been to or perhaps heard of, mountain sides, rivers, quaint little residential streets or bustling downtown scenes.  Even food dishes make it into the mix.  This takes the monotony out of the mix while also testing your ability follow instructions and further develop that keen eye for detail.  The goal of these reCaptcha’s and SolveMedia puzzles is to prevent bots from stealing satoshi from these site owners.  You WILL see ads offering to collect from faucets for you, but those are bots and bots are strongly discouraged as a form of cheating the system.  So hone your keen eye for detail and be an honourable satoshi hunter!  Perhaps share in the comments what languages you’ve seen on street signs, what countries you’ve vicariously visited and where you enjoyed going the most in the last round of faucet claims.

My method for using these sites to earn satoshi, is as follows:

1) Have all faucets open in tabs in your browser of choice.  Don’t use a rotator because you won’t be able to engage in my method very well with one of those.

2) Begin with the one-hour claim sites and note the time you began.  You’ll want to return to those in one hour. Next, move to the half-hour claim sites, you know you can claim again here when your one hour sites reach their half-way countdown.  Then move to the 15 minute claim sites and get those going.  If you have any 5 minute sites in your tabs, visit those last.  Thus begins your earnings session!

3) Now begin going around and around and around.  Generally-speaking, in the time it takes to do three 15 minute claims in a row because their timers all coincided, you’ll be able to visit your 5 min before and after all three.  When that string of claims is done, you’ll be close to claiming again in your half hour sites.  Repeat, then include your one hour sites and go around again.

4) Keep an eye out for the pop-overs and pop-unders and close them as fast as you can.  Some sites will do both, placing the reloading faucet in the middle of a sudden group of three tabs.  As you get used to the routine, you’ll learn to recognize this grouping and have the under and over closed by the time the faucet has reloaded.

5) It is best to use the XAPO wallet and XAPO faucets if you want to have your claims accumulate at a decent rate in one pool.  I haven’t done much with it yet, but another satoshi collector is called faucet hub.  I have to see what those faucets are like before I can write about them, but cashing out of a collector still means having enough in there to cover network fees.  This is the only reason I haven’t gone with faucethub or epay.

One thing to be aware of when looking at your wallet balance as it grows:  XAPO gives you the US equivalent, fully expecting that you will use your bitcoin to benefit life in the real world.  The potential problem can be watching the US amount instead of the BTC you are growing.  The US amount goes up and down based on factors affecting volatility in trading BTC.  If you have a goal of so much BTC, only watch that amount.  Remember, you’re investing TIME into this project, not cash out of your own bank account.

6) As already stated a couple times now, this is WORK!  You can get mentally tired out if you are having to clean up your cache and temp files several times in one sitting because of some rogue ad in an ad network’s line-up on one or more of the faucets you happen to have open.  Pay attention, ignore advertising, watch the clock, follow instructions, and have several hours at a time to get the ball rolling well and watch the satoshi accumulate.

How fast can YOU accumulate satoshi without referrals??!! Can you rise to the challenge??? Do YOU have what it takes to walk down Faucet Alley???