GPT stands for Get Paid To.
Get paid to watch videos.
Get paid to fill out surveys.
Get paid to search the web.
What GPT really means
In the end, GPT means “possibly get paid a very tiny amount of money to do something that takes no special skill but makes someone else slightly more money for having gone through it.”
Here's an example. I'm making the numbers up.
A marketing company is asked to conduct a study for a potential advertising campaign. They approach a site like Pollfish to create an online survey and pay them $2 per valid response for 10,000 representative responses.
Pollfish then farms this study out to sites like Swagbucks and offer Swagbucks $1.50 per valid response from their users.
If I'm a member of Swagbucks, then I can attempt the survey, and if I complete it successfully, then I get 75 SB (worth $0.75).
It might take me around 10 minutes to do, if I'm successful. I might also spend a fair bit of time only to be told that I don't qualify. They won't tell me why, and it could be for any number of reasons.
A single survey completion isn't a giant transaction even for the marketing company, but at scale it makes sense.
For the individual taking the survey, though, it's well below minimum wage, and only slightly more profitable than scrolling Tiktok.
Why would anyone spend time doing this?!
Haha, great question. I'll tell you why someone might spend time doing this.
I'll tell you the reasons I've spent a lot of time doing this.
Yeah, me.
It's easy
Watching videos, filling out surveys, etc., is easy. There's very little thinking except to pay some attention and answer truthfully. It gives the illusion of productivity when you're running on lack of sleep and caffeine like I did quite a bit.
It's a little hit of dopamine
Low-grade mental stimulation. Cheap dopamine. That dopamine addicts like me crave.
It does add up a little bit
Do these things enough and it does end up with a $10 gift card or even a $25 gift card. Hey, cool.
It can lead to passive income
If I refer other people to Swagbucks like I'm trying to do right now 🙂 I'll get a portion of what they earn doing the things. That's money I don't have to work for. In the case of Swagbucks, I've earned nearly $1,000 in referral income over a number of years. That's real money. (I still earn a small amount from referrals, but it's dropped off quite a bit with time.)
I'm dropping GPT sites where I don't have active referrals
Over the years I've signed up for a number of sites that I've never gotten any referrals on. These are the ones I'm dropping.
One such site is Timebucks. At one point I bought a package of 100 referrals and it almost paid me back with the referral income generated by them, but since then Timebucks changed the rules and I can't earn from them anymore.
I had been earning money on Timebucks through a video site that's gone through a bunch of names, but is now called PixelPoint.tv. There are a bunch of similar sites with different web addresses but they're all basically PixelPoint.tv.
The way to earn from PixelPoint.tv is to watch videos. There are a limited number of channels, and the viewing is stuffed to the gills with ads. Two or three auto-play ads for a three-minute video. It's truly awful.
I have a laptop that I run fairly constantly with PixelPoint.tv, and I need to do a CAPTCHA after a couple of hours because — shocker! — I'm not interacting with the mediocre videos stuffed with ads and they have to make a halfhearted effort to make sure I'm kinda there. Once I complete the CAPTCHA the videos start again, and I get another $0.12 or so worth of points until the CAPTCHA asks again: “Are you still there?”
This site is capitalizing on the leftovers of the leftovers of video content, and I'm glad that I can get paid a small amount to pretend that I like it.
All of that to say …
I transferred a little over 5,000 points from PixelPoint.tv to Timebucks … which put me at $11.37 in earnings … which is over the $10 payment threshold … which will allow me to stop using this service without leaving any unclaimed earnings in my account.
One less GPT site to maintain.
There are a couple of others that I have slated to do the same thing, and I'll be glad when they're gone. They have no referral income coming in, so anything I earn from those websites is all based on my labor, which I don't want to do anymore.
I'm keeping Swagbucks and others while there's referral income
Swagbucks was always the cool one. I'm also keeping InboxDollars and MyPoints. I get referral income from all of these.
I don't do the surveys, though, and I look to do the bare minimum to keep the accounts active.
When the referral income dries up, I'll likely get rid of them, too.
Working on higher-return efforts
I used to promote them more heavily than I do now. It's not difficult to find articles promoting them on Mighty Bargain Hunter.
It was — and still is, to be fair — fairly easy to plug these sites as a way of earning free gift cards.
The easy money in these sites isn't with the people earning the free gift cards, though. It's with the people referring others to these sites. I write some content, record a video, whatever, and get some referrals.
Even then, though, it took me nearly 300 referrals and a couple of really hard workers to make that $1,000 with Swagbucks.
I should be aiming higher and thinking bigger than mostly hit-or-miss referral income from GPT sites anyway.
That's why I'm cashing out of GPT sites when they run dry, and I'm not looking back.
Better late than never!
Thanks for reading!
I love helping people achieve financial peace of mind by offering ways to spend less money and make more money, both online and offline!
