Making Money From Online Games

I've blogged about earning opportunities involving computer games before, including posts about being a gaming coach, a virtual gold miner, a virtual real estate developer, etc.

Today I came across a new idea -- virtual tour guide. SynthTravels claims to be the world's first online virtual travel agency. I don't know if that's true, but I don't think I've ever seen anybody else providing a similar service. What do they do?

They arrange for virtual tourists to meet up with experienced guides inside virtual worlds for games like Age of Conan, Second Life, Project Entropia, Guild Wars, City of Heroes, There, Neocron Evolution, and others. From the information available on the site, it doesn't sound like the guides teach you how to play the game, but instead just show you around. And, at least for now, the service appears to be free.

But it got me to thinking about the potential for similar services, maybe even some kind of "one stop shop" providing several of these game-related services all on one site. And for increased opportunities for people to get paid for providing these sorts of services -- virtual tour guides, in-game coaches, bodyguards, team leaders, etc.

Paypal in More Countries and More Currencies

According to a press release at MarketWatch, Paypal members can now send and receive an addition 10 currencies, bringing the total up to 17:

Canadian Dollar, Euro, Pound Sterling, U.S. Dollar, Yen, Australian Dollar, New Zealand Dollar, Swiss Franc, Hong Kong Dollar, Singapore Dollar, Swedish Krona, Danish Krone, Polish Zloty, Norwegian Krone, Hungarian Forint, and the Czech Koruna

In addition, they've made Paypal available for people in 48 additional countries and regions:

Andorra, Anguilla, Argentina, Aruba, Australia, Austria, Bahamas, Bahrain, Barbados, Belgium, Bermuda, Botswana, Brazil, British Virgin Islands, Brunei, Canada, Cape Verde, Cayman Islands, Chile, China, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, and the Dominican Republic.

Ecuador, Estonia, Falkland Islands, Fiji, Finland, France, French Guiana, French Polynesia, Germany, Gibraltar, Greece, Guadeloupe, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, and Jordan.

Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Maldives, Malta, Martinique, Mayotte, Mexico, Montserrat, Namibia, Netherlands, Netherlands Antilles, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Pitcairn Islands, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Reunion, Russia, Samoa, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, and the Solomon Islands.

South Africa, South Korea, Spain, St. Helena, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Pierre and Miquelon, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Togo, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Tunisia, Turkey, Turks and Caicos Islands, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay, Venezuela, Vietnam, and Wallis and Futuna Islands.

Not Ready to Make Nice: The Long Tail of Public Humiliation

There's an awesome post at The Make Money Fast Hall of Humiliation blog about how much damage can be caused by even just a brief flirtation with illegal scams. And how it can impact on your life for a long looooooooong time.

It tells the story of how "CW in NJ" was briefly involved in an illegal Ponzi scam back in the heady days of the dot-com boom (1999), and how it's affected his ability to get hired because his potential employers have found out about it when they Googled him as part of their screening process. Scary!

About All Those Online Data Entry Jobs You See Advertised...

Kayode Muyibi, of Kazey Journal, has a post about his experiences responding to one of those "Data Entry" job ads you see advertised. I'm sorry that Kay got ripped off and I really hope he didn't lose too much money, but by posting copies of the "training materials" he received, he's done a lot to help other people avoid getting scammed as well.

The "data entry" scam is just a variation of the old "envelope stuffing" scam. The envolope scam goes something like this -- you read an ad claiming you can make hundreds, even thousands of dollars a week stuffing envelopes. It sounds like easy money -- you start figuring out how many envelopes you think you could stuff in an hour, multiply it by the $1 or $2 per envelope they claim you can make, and the next thing you know you realise you could retire a multimillionaire in just a couple of years (yeah, those 20-hour days will be tough, but it's a sacrifice you're willing to make). Some of the ads will talk about mailing out catalogs, or insurance forms or other important documents, but it's all bullshit. The reality is you make money by stuffing copies of the "training materials" into envelopes and sending them to people who are paying you for the valuable information, just like you paid somebody else for it.

The data entry scam works the same way, except the dollar amounts are generally a lot bigger -- I see these "training packages" being offered for prices up to $50!

So basically it's just another Ponzi scam. You make money by getting other people to pay you to tell them how they can make money, which is by telling still other people how to do it, and so on and so on. And the claim that it's all legal because you're selling a product is bullshit as well. The "product" in this case is a bunch of worthless documents telling people how to participate in the illegal Ponzi scam.

Seriously, there are lots honest, legitimate opportunities available to all of us who are interested in making money online. But there are also a lot of scams, including a lot of promises of "easy money." All I can say is to look at these things carefully and critically, and think twice before paying for anything. TANSTAAFL!

eBay Bullies: SalonQuest v Jamie Olson

It's hard to become a millionaire selling on eBay, but it's pretty easy to make a little extra money as an amateur seller. But sadly, there are people and companies out there that deliberately try to make it harder for eBay sellers.

Jamie Olson set up an eBay Store, A-List Beauty Products, at the beginning of the year. Her customers are happy (she's got a 100% positive feed back rating and a Feedback Score of 80), but not everybody's happy about Jamie's success. SalonQuest, makers of the Aquage products Jamie sells in her eBay Store, have had their lawyers send her letters demanding that she stop selling their product, claiming copyright violations.

Copyright violations??? Yeah. They say it's because she's using photographs (that she took herself) of their copyrighted containers.

On September 7, 2006, this office contacted you on behalf of SalonQuest concerning your unauthorized sales of Aquage products on eBay. Despite being formally notified that you are violating SalonQuest's legal rights, you have continued to list additional Aquage products on eBay. Also, you have continued to display copyrighted Aquage containers in your advertisements, yet another violation of SalonQuest's legal rights under the federal Copyright Act.

SalonQuest would prefer to resolve this issue amicably. However, unless you immediately and permanently discontinue your sales of Aquage products on eBay and through any other unauthorized channels, SalonQuest has authorized us to forward this matter and your file to its legal counsel for further action.

Of course SalonQuest doesn't have a legal leg to stand on, but that's not going to stop them from trying to bully small sellers like Jamie Olson, is it? Of course not!

The Copyright Act SalonQuest's sleazy shysters brilliant legal advocates are pointing to includes an exception for just the sort of thing Jamie is doing:

In the case of a work lawfully reproduced in useful articles that have been offered for sale or other distribution to the public, copyright does not include any right to prevent the making, distribution, or display of pictures or photographs of such articles in connection with advertisements or commentaries related to the distribution or display of such articles, or in connection with news reports.

Jamie isn't backing down and still has Aquage products (with pics) available for sale. And they're a good bargain too -- they seem to be selling for about half the price other online retailers are charging.

Good luck, Jamie. Give 'em hell!

(via BoingBoing)

PIPS Scammer Marsden Arrested

OK, I know all this talk about scams and fraud and all that stuff is a real bummer, and I promise I'm going to think happy thoughts and post some good stuff too, but I've got to post this one. So 'scuze me if I harsh your mellow, but I can tell you I'm doing a little happy dance here after reading that Bryan Marsden has finally been arrested.

Marsden was the man behind PIPS (People in Profit System), a global ponzi scam that he ran out of Malaysia since 1993. PIPS was a pretty elaborate investment scam that promised huge returns for those who invested in it. I can't remember the exact figures but I think the buy-in was a couple hundred bucks. Like most investment scammers, Marsden told investors he was going to do all sorts of wonderful things with the money, but it never happened. The only thing I ever heard of was a PIPS Bistro near Kuala Lumpur, but that's about it.

I can't begin to remember how many times I've dealt with people who invest in these sorts of scams. Some of them are seriously nasty individuals, but I also talked to a lot of people who were just so desperate to believe it really tore me up to read how they were "investing" money they'd been saving to put a down payment on a house, or to pay for their kids to go to college. Thinking about those people kinda kills the happy dance a bit, but I'm still glad to hear Marsden is in jail. I really hope he gets everything he deserves.

Google Base Store Connector

Given the recent issues with eBay, the LifeHacker Download of the Day -- Google Base Store Connector -- really caught my eye. I guess I've never really understood what Google Base was good for, but I downloaded the store connector to see what it could do.

Within a few minutes all the items in our eBay store were on Google Base as well. It was quick, and it was easy. According to Google, that means our items may search up in Google's regular search results as well as in Froogle results. Will we get any sales out of it? I'll be sure and let you know if we do.

Competitor Click Fraud

The Arizona Republic has just run an article by Andrew Johnson looking at yet another angle of click fraud -- competitor click fraud. Johnson explains it this way:

Companies may manually, or through "robot" software, continuously click on competitors' ads to max out their budgets and make their ads disappear from search engines. The hope is that the Internet traffic then will go to the other companies' Web sites.

This is one of the forms of click fraud that we've probably heard the most about over the last few years, but honestly I've got to wonder how prevalent it really is. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, because I'm sure it does. I'm saying I don't think it happens as often as people might think after reading articles like Mr. Johnson's.

I just don't see that many companies getting involved in the sorts of things that would be required to clickbomb their competitors. Sitting their repeatedly clicking their competitors ads might've worked a few years ago, but even the most basic anti-click fraud detection will eliminate that threat. Are they really going to get into using clickbot software or botnets? Are they going to buy paid ads to attract the legions of human clickbots involved in Paid to Read or Paid to Click programs? I just don't see it happening, unless maybe they outsource the whole thing and don't ask too many questions.

I think that for the most part, the recent media attention on click fraud is a good thing. I just hope it doesn't all get blown completely out of proportion, or point fingers in all the wrong directions. Click fraud is a complicated, multi-faceted problem, and it needs to be dealt with that way.

Sneaky Advertisers' Fine Print

We all know the old saying "If it sounds too good to be true..." but how many times a day do advertisers try to convince us to part with our hard-earned cash in exchange for the exeption to that rule? And how often do we fall for their BS?

If the answer to that last question is "Too often. Those tricky bastards!" you ought to check out Mouse Print, a blog that shows examples of all sorts of tricky fine print and other nasty tricks marketers will do to sucker you in.

Like the reality TV show Big Brother (US version) conning people into sending them an SMS text message with the word "FAN" in order to receive Big Bro ringtones, pics of the housemates, show updates, etc. Why is it a con? Because they didn't bother telling people it was a $5.95 a month subscription! They did flash some fine print on the TV screen, but according to Mouse Print it was practically impossible to read.

Another practice Mouse Print exposes is when a manufacturer surreptitiously "downsizes" an item on you. In other words, charging you the same price (or sometimes even more) for a smaller version of the product. Two recent Mouse Print examples are the change to 30 oz. instead of 32 oz. jars of Hellmann's mayonnaise, and Scott toilet paper changing the size of each sheet from 4 inches to 3.7 inches -- meaning you lose out on 25 feet of TP per roll.

Some of these are not that big a deal, but some of them are real rip-offs. But one thing they all show is that people have to be careful when dealing with some of these companies.

Mouse Print is published by ConsumerWorld.org, and they're posting some really good stuff there, and you can get the feed or sign up for a weekly email newsletter. Either way you go, it's well worth reading.

List'd -- Cool New eBay Listing Tool

After seeing the disappointing numbers for our Sept eBay sales, my wife and I have been looking at making some changes to the way we do things as eBay sellers. One thing I thought might be useful is a new eBay listing tool called List'd Express.

I signed up and gave it a bit of test-drive, and it looks pretty cool. And it really is quick and easy.

To start, you either select your own categories, or type in some keywords and it'll offer some suggestions. I tried keywords for a few different items (nothing too weird) and it managed to come up with good categories for my items.

Then you type in (or cut and paste) your item title and description (with a very easy-to-use WYSIWYG editor), then choose one of their free sample templates. Your images are hosted for free (they've partnered with PhotoBucket), but one area I think they need to improve on is their templates. They've only got a few to choose from and....well, I guess they're OK, but definitely nothing to get excited about. That doesn't really matter for us anyway because we use our own template, but a little more choice for those who want to use a List'd template would be a good idea.

The next section is the one I think they really need to work on. I understand the idea is to make it as simple as possible for people to get an auction listing up on eBay. And they can definitely do that with List'd. But they really need a few more options, which I don't think will cause too many problems because the newbies who want to keep it simple won't even have to see them.

What options? More payment methods please. They've got Paypal and check/money order and that's it. I'd say at least half our payments are made by direct deposit.

And the scheduling. The front pages says "FREE scheduled listings" but the scheduling options are extremely limited. You can either choose the usual 3-, 5-, 7-, or 10-day auction, or you can schedule it to start at 8 pm on the next Sunday (so it'll finish at 8 pm the following Sunday). This is based, of course, on the theory that Sunday nights are the best time to end your auctions -- but even if that's true now, it won't be if there are 1 million List'd users' auctions all ending at the same time, will it?

And finally the shipping. You have three choices --

1. flat-rate
2. calculated
3. no shipping

Calculated shipping is based on your ZIP code, the type of package, and the weight. You can choose up to 3 options, but they're all U.S. domestic postage only. No good for people who either sell internationally (us), or aren't located in the U.S. (us again!).

After you choose the shipping option, that's it! You can preview your listing to make sure you're happy with it, then send it to eBay and it's ready to go!

So OK, it's not really something that's going to work for us. And on the other hand, their more advanced service, MarketPlacePro is more than we need. What we're looking for is something in the middle. But for anybody who wants to be able to do a simple eBay listing in a matter of minutes, you'd be nuts not to take a look at List'd. It's free. It's easy to use. And it looks great! Check it out:





Disclosure: I'm being paid to write this review via PayPerPost.com

Payments for September 2006

Neonlights-Advertising $0.64
PolarPTR $1.77
eJury $8.00
PayPerPost $12.00
eBay $48.46

Total $70.87
Yearly Total $960.88

Online earning to a bit of a nose-dive this month, due to a massive drop in eBay sales. PTR earnings were, as usual, negligible.But since I now spend less than 10 minutes a day reading through the few interesting PTR emails I receive, that's to be expected.

The $12.00 from PayPerPost was a nice reward for writing a blog entry. I check there every few days to see if there are any other opportunities that I'm interested in, but I guess I'm pretty picky.

eBay profits were down to under $50 on just over $200 in sales. That's a BIG drop from the $150 in profit on $500 in sales we did last month, and I think that for the most part, it's a direct result of changes made at eBay. They've changed the way their search engine works, in favor of items for auction instead of items in an eBay store. We haven't been running a lot of auctions lately -- we were running one a week (with 3-5 items up for bid), and in September I think we only did one auction for the whole month.

But traffic to our eBay Store is way down, so I think if we want to get our sales and profits back up, we're going to have to do a lot more auctions. Like a lot of other eBay sellers, we've also been looking for alternatives to eBay, but so far we haven't found anything that even comes close.

More Click Fraud Headlines -- SF Chronicle

Verne Kopytoff's click fraud article (the one I blogged about last week) is now avilable.It's called Clicks That Sting -- Armies of Citizens Have Been Lured Into Fraud Rings, and it focuses on PTR programs much more than the BusinessWeek click fraud article did.

Kopytoff starts with a look at the role PTR members play:

Louise, a disabled housewife, plays a bit part in a ring of online fraudsters.

She spends her days at home in Ohio entering queries in obscure search engines and then clicking on the ads -- over and over again.

Louise's illicit clicks cost advertisers untold amounts of money. But she doesn't care because some of their losses eventually trickle into her pockets to help pay for her prescription medicine.

"All that mattered was that I needed the money," Louise said, explaining why she leaped into a career of fraud last year.

I'm starting to think the media has decided that everybody involved in PTR is poor and/or unemployed and/or on disability. Which is a shame because, while I'm sure there are plenty of people involved in PTR who fall into those categories, I'm pretty sure the majority don't. But I guess it sounds better if they can claim that getting paid to participate in click fraud is all that keeps them from being homeless. Or that they only do it so they can afford life-saving medications.

As Josh points out at Hunc Tu Caveto, once again this article only talks about Google and Yahoo, with almost no mention of the lower-tier search engines, despite the fact that a significant amount of the click fraud in PTRs involves the lower, rather than the top, tiers.

Most of the article goes on to quote various search engine industry people who try to talk up or talk down the impact click fraud is having, depending on who they work for. Google and Yahoo say they've got the situation under control, and that they filter out the clicks coming from PTRs and other sources of click fraud. But if that were the case, where's the money coming from to pay all the clickers? Sorry guys, but I ain't buying it.

On the other side of the fence, a spokesperson for a company that sells software for managing online ad campaigns says Google and Yahoo need to provide more info to advertisers so they can better manage their campaigns by finding and eliminating more of the click fraud traffic. Of course!

The article gets back to the Paid to Read industry towards the end:

The effort to shut down mom-and-pop fraudsters is being helped by a small cadre of volunteers. They do so out of duty and self interest.

They say the surreptitious work of the fraudsters taints a related but legitimate industry known as "paid to read." That industry has existed for years and revolves around companies paying Internet users small amounts of money to visit Web sites in hope that they will eventually sell them something.

Message boards devoted to the paid-to-read industry are a cacophony of accusations between members who claim to be the good guys and those who say that defrauding prosperous companies such as Google and Yahoo is fine.

The bits about volunteers acting out of "self interest" and members who claim to be the good guys is creating a bit of a fuss on the forums, and I can understand why. But I also see Kopytoff's point. A lot of the people involved in the fight to get click fraud out of PTR are doing it, at least in part, out of self-interest. Often their efforts are (consciously or not) directed towards putting their competition out of business. Owners and promoters of programs that make their money from sign-up fraud or impression fraud are more than happy to fight to get rid of search fraud, as long as it doesn't interfere with what they're doing.

Still, while some of the people trying to clean up the industry are doing it out of blatant self-interest, to tar them all with the same brush is a pretty damned harsh way to treat people who have the opportunity to earn hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of dollars a month, but choose not to because they believe it's wrong.