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| Free? |
Ok. I give in. I want a laptop.. The one I have is oldand it is making weird noises not to mention having only 64 meg of ram.. I doesn’t play DVD’s any more. Can I justtify spending the money? The answer is, I currently can’t. However it is the perfect opportunity to test out a current little wave that is sweeping the net in crowd – free stuff.
“Since June, Harvard students have been among the 200,000 people visiting freeipods.com every day, on their way to getting one of the $300 digital music players for free. According to Peter Martin, co-founder of the company that started freeipods.com, Gratis Internet, the company has sent out over 6,500 ipods. In the 02138 zip code alone, Martin estimated that several thousand customers have signed up.” – quote in context
I can’t tell you how skeptical I was when the “do you want a free [whatever]” links started popping up. I checked into the offers and it seems that the legitimate ones are the brainchild of Gratis Internet – a company with pretty startlingly reputable looking credentials. A fair number of folks who are not easily prone to giving credence to this stuff tried it and it seems to have paid off.
Now the business model is simple and is a flat system, not a [[wp:pyramid scheme]. Gratis has found advertisers who are willing to pay them a certain value per customer who tries their services. Gratis skims some of that money as profit and uses the rest to bribe you un-mercifully. In my case, I want a laptop while Kimiko is trying for a LCD monitor and I am not sure Tatsumi is going to play though a Mac Mini might be fun!.
How it works is, I sign up and accept a trial of one of their offers. Some of them are free, some of them are free if you cancel because you don’t like the service or product. Then, I need to have 17 people click my referral link and do the same, signing up and choosing to try one of the offers. When Gratis has confirmation that all 18 of us (me and 17 others) have accepted a trial then they ship me an laptop. Kimiko, BTW, needs 8 total. I don’t mind if you help her instead ๐
I know I know, sounds like a scam. It sounds amazingly like a scam. However the math on their model does work out it seems, and they have shipped a lot of free stuff. People that want to help me out can keep these things in mind:
- After you apply, they have a whole bunch of Yes/No questions that show up one at a time. These do not count as “offers” for my credit so you can take them or not as you choose. The one that matters is the one that says specifically “Now complete an offer!’ and “Complete one of the offers below”.
- You can sign up using a Gmail or MSN email account… so no spam fears. If you need a Gmail account I’ll happily trade you a Gmail invitation for a referral ๐
- For the few offers that need a credit card to activate the free trial, you can use a WebCertificate pre-paid credit card and thus avoid anyone having access to your “real” card.
- You do not have to convince anyone to sign up “under you”. This is no pyramid. Unless you want a laptop too ๐
- If you are going to try and help both Kimiko and I then you need to select different offers for each of us.
- Please [let me know] if you decide to help out so I can make sure your offer acceptance gets me the credit I need ๐
Enjoy! And happy helping!
ed. note: yes, I am a whore