Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Get Paid to Play -- Moola.com

I got an invitation the other day to join a new site called Moola.com, and I'm having a blast playing games there.

The basic idea is pretty simple. You start with one cent. You play a game against another person with one cent and whoever wins keeps the money. So if you win, you've got two cents. Then you play somebody else for two cents, and if you win you've got four cents. Do it 30 times and you've got yourself...wait for it...over $10,000,000.

Math isn't my thing, but I think the odds on actually doing that are something around a billion to one. But still, it's fun trying, and with a bit of strategy and a lot of luck, you might get through nine rounds and turn your $0.01 into $5.

And did I mention that they even give you the first penny to get you started? Sweet!

Of course there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. The pennies come from advertisers, so before each game, you watch a short (around 30 second) advertisement and then answer a question to prove you were paying attention. Some of the questions are really tricky, so you might end up watching the ad more than once. I think that's pretty clever, and it'll be interesting to see if they can make the business model work.

At this point it's still invitation-only. I've got a few invitations, so if you want to try it out, email me at moolanow at gmail dot com and I'll fix you up.