My Review of Inbox Dollars
By Steve Gillman - September 6, 2014
 Inbox Dollars calls itself "The online
reward club that pays," but how well does it pay? That depends
on how you use it. Here is a list of some of the ways you can
make money with Inbox Dollars:
- Take surveys
- Click on e-mail ads
- Play games online
- Watch videos
- Use their search engine
- Complete "offers"
- Refer others to Inbox Dollars
(Flickr photo by Rosenfeld
Media)
Most of those sound like pretty easy ways to make money, right?
And it's free to sign up.
I enrolled in May of this year and, as advertised, they immediately
put a $5 bonus in my account. That was nice, although then I
discovered that I would have to have $30 in the account before
I could get a payment.
They don't make that clear before you sign up. If it's mentioned
in the non-member parts of the website I sure can't find it.
This bait-and-switch tactic, and deceptiveness in general, is
common with online survey companies. I previously reported on
this tendency in a post on my personal blog about making
money with surveys.
But I did eventually receive a payment in my PayPal account.
I might get another depending on how well this article works
out -- more on that in a moment. But up front, I have to tell
you this: Being a member of Inbox Dollars is probably a waste
of time.
My Experience With Inbox Dollars
I did a few surveys to start. They pay very little for the
time, but they have a few that you are automatically qualified
for when you sign up. You might get 75 cents for one that takes
ten minutes, and a dollar or two for longer ones.
Once I burned through those pre-qualified ones this was like
other survey sites, meaning I qualified for about one in ten
that I started. Typically you'll have offered up opinions and
information for several minutes before being notified that you
don't fit the profile or whatever the excuse is. Of course they
could have you complete a more thorough profile so you either
qualify or not before you start, but given the amount of information
you have to offer up before being rejected, I suspect this is
just a trick used to get you to do surveys without having to
pay you.
Did I mention that all of these survey companies seem to
use deception?
But Inbox Dollars is more than a survey site, so let's look
closer. They will pay you for clicking on ads in emails, for
example. These definitely pay out every time. If you check your
account you'll see that you are credited the money within seconds
of clicking the link in the email. But the pay is just 2 cents
per email, and you'll get only a few daily. By the way, it's
more efficient to delete the emails and just go to your account
page at Inbox Dollars, where you can open and click them ten
at a time every few days.
If you make their search page into your homepage you can start
using their search engine in place of Google and get paid for
each search. You get a half-cent for each valid search, up to
fifteen cents daily. It isn't quite as good as Google, but it
works well enough for most purposes.
You can print out coupons and when you use them at the store
you'll be credited 10 cents when you use one. The selection is
pretty limited, so I didn't see anything I could use.
The offers you get paid to complete are sometimes free, and
with no credit card required. Other offers require a subscription
using a credit card and are free only if you cancel within a
certain amount of time.
How Much Can You Really Make?
If you learn to do surveys fast, click the paid emails several
at a sitting, and generally do things as efficiently as possible,
it might be possible to make $4 or $5 per hour -- but I doubt
it. I would plan on about $2 for every hour of your time.
The surveys make this clear as day. For example, you'll see
a 75-cent survey that will say "Estimated Time: 20 minutes."
That would be a rate of $2.25 per hour, except that for every
one you can actually complete you'll spend at least another twenty
minutes starting and being disqualified from others, bringing
your wage closer to $1 per hour.
After two months (yes, two months) I got to $30 in my account
and went to cash out, only to learn that they charge a $3 fee
for sending a check or a pre-paid Visa card.
Did I mention that all of these survey companies seem to
use deception?
You can wait until your balance hits $40 to avoid the fee,
by the way, but I wanted to see if I would actually get paid,
and I was sick of surveys, so I took the check for $27. I was
warned that it took a while to process a payment and that my
account had to remain active for payment to be processed. Nice.
I clicked a paid email once weekly until the check arrived a
month later.
How You Really Make Money With Inbox Dollars
How do you actually make some decent money with this company?
This is it right here:
Sign
up for Free for Inbox Dollars and Get a $5 Bonus
You see, if I convince you to sign up through that link (how
am I doing?), I get paid 10% of everything you make. Now you
can waste your time doing surveys, playing games, and clicking
email links, and I'll get paid $3 for every $30 you make.
I suspect that some of the big blogs actually get hundreds
of members signed up. If 100 of these are active enough to generate
$30 in income every month, the blog owner's share would be $3
times 100 or $300 per month, possibly for a long time. After
all, some people do like playing games and doing surveys for
sub-minimum wage. Referring a thousand active members could net
a blog or website owner $3,000 per month in residual income.
And, of course, if you want to tap into that, you have
to sign
up for Inbox Dollars (now this is morphing from a crappy
survey and paid-browsing plan into something like a pyramid scheme).
I made this sound like so much fun that I figure maybe a dozen
of the 5,300 subscribers to my newsletter will sign up for Inbox Dollars (you got to keep
slamming that referral link in their faces, you see). If half
of them stick with it and make $30 in the next month I'll make
$18 in affiliate income. That means, if I spend two hours creating
and promoting this page, I'll have made a bit more than minimum
wage. Yay!
By the way, did I mention that you should sign
up for Inbox Dollars?
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