Earning Pennies an Hour: Swag Bucks

This summer I somehow was introduced to Swagbucks.  I don’t exactly remember how, but I signed up and started filling out my profile for a few points.

Worth one one-thousandth of a cent!

If you’re unfamiliar with Swagbucks, its basically like your old-fashioned “surveys for gift cards” rewards sites, but on steroids.  Essentially, 1 swag buck is worth $0.01 in the form of an Amazon, Wal-Mart, Target, or PayPal gift card.  You can actually exchange 450 swag bucks for a $5 Amazon card, so the rate is a little better if you go that route.

The nice thing about SwagBucks is the sheer opportunity to get swag bucks.  The bad thing is it adds up very disproportionally to the time you have to put in.  Examples:

• Polls are usually around 50 swag bucks ($0.50) and take around 20 minutes to take.  If you’re lucky you might qualify for some more valuable surveys.
• You can watch sponsored videos (mostly the ads preceding them) for about 2 swag bucks per minute.  There’s a limit for these, though once you reach it, you can watch Swagbucks’ library of videos.  The rate there is a little worse.  Watching 10 videos (at about 30 seconds each) gets you 3 swag bucks.
• Apparently you can get swag bucks for searching the web through their site, but I haven’t used it that much.
• Once a day or so they’ll throw you a code for some free swag bucks on their Facebook page.

There’s some others, but I only stick to the surveys and the videos.  Basically, I can usually rack up 100 swag bucks ($1) in one to two hours while watching TV.  WOOOOOOOO PENNIES AN HOUR!!!!

Certainly, it’s not something I would put time into at a serious level.  Basically, I pull up the site when I’m watching baseball games.  And once school starts back up (rather soon…) I’ll likely be forgetting about it completely.  When I started, I was all excited at the notion of raking in big money and in August going on a $100 spending spree at Wal-Mart.  However, earning these pennies has taken longer than I thought, so that won’t be happening. 

Still, I’ve hit the $50 mark and will be purchasing my school supplies on SwagBucks’ dime.  Considering the time I put in was mostly while watching baseball games or with CNN on in the background, I’ll take it.  Like I said, you aren’t really earning anything worth any dedicated amount of time, but you can slowly build up a few bucks while watching TV, which isn’t the worst deal in the world.