Sassy Black Friend

The strangest things…

I get obsessed with the strangest things, really. After my weekend shopping trip I was sitting in the living room thinking about the floors in the house. They’re all hardwood and tile, which make them easy to clean, but not very comfortable in cold weather. Neither the boyfriend or I wear shoes in the house much, and we don’t own a single pair of slippers.

Now, we have a couple of fantastic rugs in key areas, but we can’t exactly afford to slap down an area rug anywhere we might walk.

So I turned to J, who never wears shoes inside and is always cold. She introduced me to the idea of slipper socks. We are hooked. More on that later, including photos of our new colorful collection.

YouData pays you to look at ads

I was doing some research for a report and I happened upon a new website, YouData. I sent info to L to see if she’d heard of it, but she hadn’t. So, I checked it out and figured I would try it to see if I could contribute to the Work at Home Jobs Experiment area.

The site says:

Your attention is a valuable product. Advertisers need it, and you are the sole owner and supplier. Stop giving it away. Stop letting other people sell it!

You should be the only one selling your attention.

By placing a price on your attention, even a small one, you start to filter out irrelevant advertisers who do not want to waste their money buying the wrong attention. Think you hate irrelevant ads? Think how advertisers feel – they have had to PAY for them for decades! Give advertisers a direct market and a fair price for your product, and only ads relevant find their way to you.

Fair enough, so how does it work?

First you sign up for an account on the YouData site. You have to confirm your identity with an email address and a phone number. Then they ask you to fill out a somewhat extensive profile. It’s your choice how much information you provide, but the more you tell, the better chance you have to match to advertisers. I filled out the whole thing in about 10 minutes, so it isn’t too much work.

Once your profile, or MeFile (as they call it) is complete, you can open the advertising widget to see what ads are available for you. The following is a screen capture of my widget, with no ads available right now – more on that later.

If there are ads that you match, they appear in the list. You get a certain amount of money for viewing the list of ads, and more for clicking through to each ad’s landing page. Here’s a partial list of the ads I got in my first week and what they paid (I’ve blacked out the individual advertiser information) but you can see how it works.

All together there were 20 some ads I was able to view and get paid for. YouData says they pay via PayPal on a weekly basis – every Friday, and so far they have. This was my first week and I got a payment notice this afternoon.

One thing to note, however, is that YouData is brand new, and don’t have a lot of advertisers yet. So there’s no flood of ads to view. Like I said, I had about 20 when I signed up, so we’ll see how many more come in over the next few weeks.

The company is very up front with their new status, and says:

We’re just getting started! This is a pretty new concept, and we have not reached all the advertisers yet. We appreciate your patience and assure you that we are working hard to spread the word that advertising can actually work better for everybody when consumers and advertisers can deal with each other directly.

Just so you know, though anyone can create a MeFile, YouData is most actively rolling out in 3 geographic/local markets in Texas, in addition to one very significant national demographic, online females and mommy bloggers. Hey – we have to start somewhere! If you live or go to school in the areas we are focusing, or are female, you should see the number of ads increasing relatively steadily and quickly. In other locations and demographics, it might take a little longer to see a significant number of ads flowing your way, but we WILL get to you. [Emphasis mine]

So that’s a caveat. You can kind of tell from the profile questions the kind of advertisers they have so far. I’m a woman with a pet so I did pretty well.

The verdict? We’ll see. They paid on time and the site is easy to use, so I’m cool with it so far. There’s also some thing you can download to see the ads without going to the site, I assume it’s a browser add on, but that’s not my kind of thing. If anyone else has used YouData, what did you think? Oh, and they do have an affiliate program, the details of which I have not at all checked out, so I may or may not get something if you sign up for YouData via this link.

Work at Home Jobs Experiment – Little Sister’s Today.com blog

This experiment is only mine on the technical side. My Little Sister (not actually my sister, more like an emotional parasite I can’t get rid if) asked me to help her setup a blog on Today.com. I’d never heard of it, but I have to admit, not a bad deal for the causal blogger.

You earn $1 for every approved post (seems like they’ll approve anything over 100 words) for 1 post per day. So, you can’t post 50 times in a day and make $50. Fair enough. You also get paid a small amount for the traffic your blog receives.

The catch, of course, is you don’t have total control over the blog, and can’t use any other moneymaking tools on it. There are google ads on all of the blogs, but they’re managed by Today.com, not the user. Hopefully she’ll make enough to get be a good Christmas gift this year.

For beginners like Little Sister, that’s just fine. $1 a day is enough to remind her to write something. Here comes the shameless plug. Check out Little Sister’s Always Watching blog where she writes about the crappy television shows she likes to watch.

Work at Home Jobs Experiment – My Lot

This is the second site in my work at home job experiment series.

MyLot is an online message board site where you get paid to create and participate in discussions about pretty much anything you can think of. The beginning was a little rough for me. The sign up process felt like a personality test. After creating an account I had to select from over 200 “roles that I play in life” and that was only the first of a dozen categories to select from. Yikes.

But, once I got through that, things were a lot better. You can search and browse for discussions related to the issues you select, or look at new and popular discussion topics. I responded to a few quick questions like “do you eat breakfast everyday” and “how often do you get drunk” to get familiar with the site, and then tried starting my own.

Unsurprisingly, my thread about NPR got no attention, but asking what movie to see with friends did pretty well. Like any huge site, it’s really difficult to get a topic moving, because there’s so much competition. Most of the really popular topics are about making money online, which… duh.

I wrote 12 posts in 2 days (probably 1 1/2 hours in total time) and have made $0.19 so far. So, not exactly a cash cow. But, the site is fun, and I think you have to look at it like a nice way to spend time, and earn a little money as a bonus. I would definitely recommend this site as a good way to waste some time and talk to interesting people.

Ok, one quick Mechanical Turk update

I have enough brain power to do this one thing today, update the status from my Amazon Mechanical Turk experiment.

I submitted a total of 11 tasks (or HITS), and have only had 4 approved so far. Not exactly moving at lightening speed there. I’ll wait until some of the others go through, since requesting $1.46 seems silly.  Oh, and all told, the 11 took less than an hour to complete, so we’ll see what the rate ends up being.

Work at Home Jobs Experiment – Amazon Mechanical Turk

I started with this one for two reasons. First, I love me some Amazon.com (plus I trust them), and I didn’t understand what the hell this was about until I looked into it for a while.

The Amazon Mechanical Turk allows you to… er… help companies do things that don’t take a lot of time, and get paid a little bit for it. That’s as specific as I can be, but here’s an article from CNET that covers it a lot better.

I was able to sign up using my existing Amazon account, but had to confirm my email address to sign up for whatever allows them to pay me. That took 5 minutes. Then, I took a look at the tasks, or “HITs” to perform. I selected the first 5 that seemed easy, quick, and remotely interesting. Here’s a sample of what I did:

Picture classification task
I looked at 11 photos of product packaging and identified whether the provided word was or was not the brand name of the product. Like a really easy quiz, so that was fun. It took about 5 minutes (2 of which was spent going through the examples, like that was necessary), and the payment is $0.35.

Three sentence variations
This was a real bastard, to be honest. They provided a list of different phrases (related to medicine), and I had to enter three variations of each statement. So, if the phrase was “I love to eat cookies” you could say “I enjoy eating cookies a lot” and so on. The goal is to rephrase without changing meaning. I honestly cant’ imagine how this is useful, but it took 20 minutes and I made $0.80 for it. Ugh.

Rewrite website description
This task sent me to an ad for a website, with a request to rewrite the current description, or add my own. The one I got was incomprehensible, so I spent about 10 minutes looking at the site in the ad, and writing a short description of it, for $0.30. The site was about haircuts, so it was at least kind of useful. Turns out my weird bob is in style right now.

Three hours after completing these only 2 have been approved, so I’m going to wait until more are to do anymore. The site is pretty neat, it shows updated stats, and there seem to be thousands of available tasks. But, as you can see, they’re not exactly earning you a lot of money. Right now the highest cost available is $7.50 for what seems to be hours of work.

Up next, MyLot paid message board posting…