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How Do ‘Pay to Click’ Sites Work?

UPDATE: If you are reading this, please know that the owner of Pay2Surf never paid out. So much for a reputable PTC site.

Anyone who has done any kind of digging around the net looking for ways to make money online has stumbled on the plethora of 'Pay to Click' sites. The premise sounds good: click an ad/view a page, get paid. But are they an effective way to make money?

For me, the extensive list of these sites sends up a red flag. Why? Honestly, most of them look spammy, cheesy, or just plain stupid. And besides, who in their right mind would pay you to click a link? Well, lets take a look at how they work...

For this article, we will be looking at one site in particular - Pay2Surf.net (one that I know for a fact is legit).

How to Pay to Click Sites Make Money
First, in order to get paid it's necessary that a site is able to generate money. Pay2Surf makes money by selling both advertisements (banners, text) and allowing site owners to pay for traffic. Essentially, the site owner pays for x amount of unique visits, and the site is placed in the 'view ads' section for people to click on until the amount of paid visits is reached.

Another way that Pay2Surf makes money is by selling referrals. How does that work? Basically, when you sign up for an account (without using a referral link) you are nobody's referral. Users of the site can 'purchase' these unreferred users, and they are placed under the user as their own referral. Make sense? No? I know, it sounds a bit confusing, but if you start using their service you will learn quickly.

How Do I Make Money With Pay to Click Sites?
Now that we've covered how Pay2Surf gets their part of the cash, lets look at how YOU make money (because that's why you are here, right?) with these sites.

Basically, you sign up, view the ads for 15-30 seconds, and the money is credited to your account. Yes, that's it. Yes, it's worth it for Pay2Surf AND the advertiser. Why? Because traffic = potential customers/RSS subscribers/ad clickers.

But if you want to make more money from the system (instead of relying on the 10 or so ads per day you are viewing), you need to get referrals. There are two ways to do this: 1) tell friends, blog readers, etc. about the service and give them your affiliate link to sign up with or 2) purchase referrals from Pay2Surf directly. Now it's beginning to make sense, eh?

Conclusion
You CAN make money with these 'pay to click' sites, but you have to be smart about it. Don't set your expectations too high. If you think you will be able to quit your job within a couple of months, you are mistaken. In fact, I doubt that anyone has ever made this kind of money off of these sites (except maybe the site owners). And for crying out loud, go with a reputable site, like Pay2Surf.