For the past 10+ years, Swagbucks has been one of the leading websites to pay you to make Internet searches. I've personally used them for over a decade now and have probably earned somewhere in the neighborhood of $1500 in Amazon giftcards.
Now before I go any further, let me just say one thing. There's absolutely no reason why you shouldn't be using Swagbucks. If you routinely search for things online via a typical search engine, then you're searching without the possibility of winning something. Any time you search on Google, your odds of winning a prize is 0%. Even if your odds of winning a prize on these two sites are 0.01%, that's better than nothing, no? Plus, given the facts that most people make multiple searches a day and that winning percentages are higher than that small number, you're essentially throwing away money if you're not using either one of these sites.
In addition, I could swear I win more often with Swagbucks. Of course this is highly unscientific and subjective, but while researching this article, I won $2 Swagbucks ($1 Swagbuck and then another 15 minutes later). Now while those can't be redeemed for anything worthwhile on their own, you only need 45 Swagbucks for a $5 Amazon giftcard. Given that you start out with $3 Swagbucks when you sign up, I'm already 11% of the way there after 1 day.
Now, it's not all rainbows and gumdrops with Swagbucks. The biggest drawback is the sponsored ads mixed in with the search results. As some of you might remember, that's what killed Blingo and Winzy many years ago. Both, as luck would have it, actually cut back on the ads mixed in with the search results. Guess they learned their lesson a bit too late when so many people jumped ship. As it stands now, they've got 4 sponsored ads in the search results. That's kind of a pain, but as I type this, right hand to God, I just won another Swagbuck. It's not even noon and I've got $3 Swagbucks under my belt for the day. I can put up with clearly marked sponsored ads in my search results if my winning average stays this high.
So for now, I'm drinking the Swagbucks Flavor Aid. Are you going to make millions? No. Are you going to make hundreds? Doubtful. But is there the opportunity to win enough Swagbucks every month to snag a free giftcard or two? Heck yes. Can the same be said for using Google or Yahoo?
Exactly.