Do the people who own freebie sites actually sustain enough profit to make it their permanent job? or is it just a side job?

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This topic has been moved from "Starting Out / Informational->Freebie University" to "General->Lounge->Freebie Related".

Depends. For 99.9% of site owners who get all of their traffic from forums, it is definitely not a permanent job. For people like Trainn and FreePay, it's a permanent job because they have "genuine" users sign up.

since no site owners responded here yet, i would say the same thing. it depends on the success of the site, and how you promote it. trainn and freepay [were] the most popular, and trainn continues to be, and they are nice enough to come on the forum for support, but they get so much traffic from the general public too. freepay faded out a lot, but many people still know them by name.

What are you talking about? Just because not many forum users complete their sites, it doesn't mean they're "fading out." FreePay has the best domains and is, and will continue to be, the largest and most successful freebie network.

I would like to know upon what information you base this statement.

It's true. They still have those monkey ads everywhere I go.

EDIT: As for the original statement...yeah, freebie site owners don't make enough for a living...at least most of them. Just look at Leo...he owns like 15-20 sites and he's still a loser.

freepay has faded out. their support isnt what it used to be, they still operate their sites but its very slow. wasnt talking about their forum presence. in fact i think thats why theyre no longer on the main a4f page.

Just because they're not on A4F doesn't mean they faded out. C'mon...don't kinney this post too.

I don't think she said that. Actually, she said the opposite.

Who? If you mean kinney, kinney is a male...and kinney said that freepay faded out. I'm pretty sure that part is clear. And that's the part I'm refuting.

Did you just call Kinney a SHE??? LOL............

schizerbone knows exactly what i was saying, because he's a vet, he's just choosing to ignore that to act silly instead.

at this point in time, freepay is not even a garauntee that you will receive your gift. the last person to post about their experience, has not received a support ticket response in 4+ months, and has been waiting for his gift for 10+ months since he got approved. he had to file an attorney general complaint last month.

Ooops! I did know kinney was a male of course. It's that bloody avitar the made my brain throw up a partition and ignore the fact. Sorry kinney.


Ditto...


My comment was on what I read. You took his statement and reversed it and then disagreed with it. To be clear, kinney said:


He's saying that because freepay has faded out, they are no longer on the a4f page.

You (schiz) said:


Where you imply he was saying that they faded out because they are not on A4F. You got it reversed.

You're just talking about quality. That has nothing to do with fading away or what the original poster was talking about (making a living being an owner). Freepay hasn't faded away and nothing you can say can change this fact.

you are retarded. i mentioned freepay because it was one of the top two successful networks. they were covered by cnn a couple of years ago. the difference between them and trainn, is that trainn continues to operate normally and gets a lot of traffic. freepay has faded out as forum users became weary of their service and their support slowed down a lot. but that hasn't changed how many people still know about freepay. if you advertise your sites right, then people won't forget. in fact i think they are sitting on a big opportunity. but yes they have faded away. their sites are still online but their support is hardly ever there to help you out with your account.

Hey.. Do you old salts do a lot of promoting your referral links outside of the forum, like ads or sco websites? I saw an add from ebay where I guy was promoting a one offer site and he was specifically promoting to do the stamps.com offer. The deal was it costs nothing, you get $5 in stamps and you get a referral link that will pay you like $40 or so for each referral you find. He was not paying them to do the referral, so he pocketed the whole gift. kind of like on the a4f front page links. It gave explicit directions on how to do the stamps.com signup, but did not talk about cancellation.

I don't recall where I saw it. It was during a google search. I wonder how successful something like that would be. He kept it simple and free.

as a user i have found enough success for me on the forum. i bought a front page link here and there, but i still find directly trading is the best way to get garaunteed green referrals. btw, one thing, you are not allowed to "walk" a referral through the site, which means telling them which offer to do. so that guy didnt really advertise right.

Any ad like that would be breaking the rules in telling the referral what offer to do. I've seen plenty of vids on YouTube like this get yanked because not only does it break the rules, but it is a copyright infringement on stamps.com which violates the TOS of YouTube.

I do a lot of off-forum marketing, get tons of sign-ups and very few greens. The general masses still consider freebie tradign to be a scam, IMO.

I've heard that you cannot walk a referral through a signup, but I still don't know why this would be copyright infringement. If I write a tutorial on how to use windows, I'm not infringing on Microsoft. Where is the infringement to the Stamps.com? Don't they want people to sign up? Why wouldn't they like someone helping a new customer do the signup? Makes no sense to me.

If your tutorial uses Microsoft's copyrighted logos and printed materials, you certainly are infringing upon its copyright just as lots of these ads do to stamps.com or other companies whose offers they use. Why would these companies not want sign-ups obtained from this type of marketing? I think the answer is pretty obvious, most people who do offers from this type of marketing have no intention of keeping the product and commit offer fraud by signing up for the offer, not trying it and then canceling. A company like stamps.com is losing $5 for each fraudulent sign-up.

Jeez, you love kinney'ing your post eh?

Person A: "Hey, can you make a living being an owner?"
Person B: "Probably not, except for TraInn and Freepay"

--convo should be over, but kinney is ready to kinney the post--

Kinney: "Freepay has faded out! *continues with incoherent rant about Freepay which has nothing to do with the original statement*"

I'm hoping one day you and common sense can find a common ground and make up...right now it's like you two are at war.

u can't have a living beeign a freebie owner,with the profit you need to invest/invest/invest! not just sit there and wait..forex/hyip/muzic/everything..

Actually more. Don't forget they are paying the affiliate (ie, freebie site in this case) to deliver them quality users.

Exactly, didn't think my answer through all the way.

idk about copyright infringement, but i know how to break down the offer part. you are to sign up for offers of interest. when someone is walking people thru the site, they are telling people to do an offer, maybe one they are not interested in. this creates a problem for the offer company, because they receive lots of signups, followed by lots of cancellations. stamps.com pulled their offer a few times within the last year, because of this exact reason. i think they are still pulled but idk, i stopped following it.

:edit: also stamps.com used to be a 1 credit / full credit offer for a long time i think, and when they came back, they were a lesser credit weight on all sites. in other words people were doing them because it was a free trial, full credit offer, including minors. eventually stamps.com did what they did to try to curb the problem.

I don't think you have to use logos and printed materials from the site to advertise stamps.com as the eBay fella did, no more than we do here.

I'm still not completely convinced that giving help with how to complete an offer or even which offer to do, is going to lead to more or less people keeping the subscription in the end (where's the data?). I get it that you are supposed choose offers that interest you, so that you may want to keep it. That’s still the case in the situation where someone recommends an offer to you. You still can choose whether or not to complete it, base on whether or not you want it. I know it's a no-no to do this, and I don’t plan to, but I haven't heard a convincing enough explanation as to why it’s wrong.

it's wrong because it's against the rules. of every freebie site. and this forum. that's reason enough for anybody, because you can go on hold if they find you doing it.

but other than that, it's wrong because people will abuse the walk-thru. a lot of people referred, not caring about the concept of doing offers, and recommended a specific / easy offer, to get an easy referral. then this invited minors also, who could sign up for free trials and use an illegal gift card to cover the fees. such gift cards have since been banned and wont be accepted. this rule (no walk thru's) is set up to protect from the selfish end of human nature. b/c otherwise it WOULD lead to cancellations beyond what is normal, and then you get an example like the post above with stamps.com. it wasnt that long ago, and site owners commented about what they knew from the inside about why it dissappeared. it then eventually came back as a level B offer / less than 1-credit offer. actually if site owners came in here then they could give a better answer about all of this from the first post. so as you can see, a walk-thru is connected to the other no-no's in freebie sites rules and trading as well. it's temping to recommend offers to your trade partner, when you have good intentions and want to share good offers, but we're all better off not doing it, and using the offer forum instead to post about offers we like / don't like.

p.s. oh yea and one more thing, the way this forum is today, is different than the way it has been in the past. this forum runs pretty smooth with minimal problems thanks in part to the rules that have been put in place over time, to curb offer fraud, minors, and scamming, and anything negative. so you might question "why" right today, but if you had seen it only a year ago or a little longer, it was worse off and these rules were desperately needed, and it was clear why they were put in place. if you ask "why" about a rule today, it's probably because the rule has done such a good job at making freebie trading look nice in this forum.

Thanks kinney for the detailed response, but it still didn't get to my point. I am well aware of the forum rules and made clear that I would not break them. I was not talking about within forums. I was referring to advertising outside the forum, which is not discouraged by site owners.

I'm not clear on what you mean by a "walk thru", but I think I know what you mean. How is a link on the front page of A4F different from a "walk thru"?

Telling your refs that they should complete a certain offer is a walkthrough. A link on the front page of A4F is simply a referral link.

Now I feel stupid. Pretty obvious. Thanks.

oh i think i get it. the referring rules are the same, within the forum and outside the forum. so if you made a youtube video or a blog telling people which offer(s) are cheapest or easiest, this can get you into trouble if it is found by the site admin. lets say you have an account and did an offer, if your referrals sign up and all do that same offer, it looks suspicious. this might also lead to trouble if the admin did some investigating with help from the forum. ugh this hurts my brain to think back, but i know there's threads discussing this around a4f.

p.s. trainn just added exact links to different sites where you can set up and advertise your trainn link. this is a good idea, and part of why trainn is successful.

:edit: the following are reasons why an account could go on hold at freepay. freepay was kind of the standard that all other sites followed when it comes to the terms and conditions:
"(e) Posting information on a website, forum, or auction that has to do with "canceling the offers" included, but not limited to, cancellation phone numbers, cancellation time frames, and any encouragement or direction to cancel the offers after signing up with them.

(f) Bidding on trademarked keywords associated with our advertising partners or their affiliates in Internet search engines to gain referrals through sponsored search results. (e.g. Bidding on the keyword "Blockbuster" in Google and appending your referral link to this bid upon keyword.)

(g) Posting your referral link in places where it is not welcome, or spamming your referral link online in any capacity is strictly prohibited. If we see or receive complaints about your referral methods that we deem risky, we may place your account or accounts on hold."

walking a referral thru the process and telling which offer may be mentioned somewhere in their t&c, but you can kind of see the point that holds can result from doing stuff anywhere, not just on the forums

I've yet to do a trainn site. I should get around to doing one of those sometime. I guess I don't like the format, as you have to get too many referrals before you receive a gift. Of course, that's part of the plan as many never get to cash out and trainn doesn't have to pay. It took me over a month to get 3 referrals on 3 different sites and that's with one week as a stickie. How long would it take me to get the 8, 10, 12 or more referrals required to complete a single trainn site? It would be next year at this rate. I'm not very good at this...

yea i know. but its soo worth it, in my opinion. you could finish a site in about a month, if you work at it, or longer for the higher up gifts like 10+ referrals. being premium helps open you up to new users who havent done the site yet, and doing ref4ref opens you up to more trading possibilities (+ you try / buy products in exchange for your ref, which, to me, is more fun). i like to take my time for trainn sites tho. and also b/c i like to try to get quality refs every time.

Yeah, but it's easier getting refs on TraInn sites since it requires just one offer (but yeah, it does attract more scammers, so you gotta be more careful).

A little late, but the fact that they have the BEST domains should be more than enough. If you're someone who has no knowledge of incentivized marketing and decide to get into it, what are the chances of you typing in, "yourPS34free.com," instead of, "freePS3.com?"