Rob's Blog

Back in February I wrote that the promising service Homepages Friends (formally MySearchFunds) had stopped paying out, (wel, they seemed to have stopped paying me anyway).

Any members will have seen the emails they sent recently. The first one seemed to give you the option of paying your earnings to a charity instead and the second one gave tyhe option of using the earnings to offset your carbon emissions. Neither was very clear about what exactly was happening.

Today I received an email clarifying it. They are going to stop paying users for their searches (as of 1 August), and instead will be donating it to your chosen “cause”.

They do say that any searches made before then will be paid (regardless of whether the threshold is reached), but I’m not sure whether to trust that, given how long I’ve waited for my payout (they owe over £50 now).

They are still due to pay for referrals, but only a flat ratre so it could take a long time to make anything!

I decided to look for an alternative, and came across Scour. They don’t pay as much per search, but you can increase your earnings by reviewing or voting for results. It also aggregates Google, MSN (or Bing) and Yahoo results, and it all looks much slicker than HomepagesFriends (in fact it looks like a nice search engine even without the payment!). Worth a try. Of course it would be great if you used my referral link.

I’d love to hear your comments.

Just a quick post to announce that My Homepages Friends which I’ve blogged about in the past (previously known as Mysearchfunds) really does pay.

I got a payment for £31.53 into my account today. That’s for 3 months of searches. I assume it includes some income from people I’ve referred, because otherwise it doesn’t add up.

So, if you haven’t signed up yet, do so now and get paid to search the web (currently using Yahoo). It’s free, and I can now confirm it really does pay!

I wrote last Tuesday that My Search Funds (the site that pays you for your web searches) was to become Homepages Friends. This change took place yesterday.

The biggest change is that Yahoo is now used for the searches. I haven’t done enough searches to be able to judge the quality of the results, but I doubt they are as good as Google. I would guess the cashback per search is likely to be similar though.

The other change is to the “personal homepage”. As well as the main search box, there are tabs for “My Gadgets”, “My Shops”, “My Bookmarks” and “My Blog”. None of these are functional yet, but they seem to be aiming at an iGoogle sort of service.

Interestingly, despite them quoting the domain homepagesfriends.com in their logo, the domain they are using is myhpf.co.uk!

Sign up here and take a look, and start earning. I’ve accumulated over £30 so far, and am close to £20 “past 45 days” threshold I need for my first payment!

My Search Funds announced today in an email to their users (or at least me) that they are to become Homepages Friends. It seems they are moving away from just paid searches, to add more cashback services (like their existing eBay cashback).

One downside is that they are moving away from Google to use Yahoo as their search provider. It looks like they are hoping to add more Yahoo services to Homepages Friends in the future. Maybe we will see a service that pays you to check your mail?

The Homepages Friends domain (homepagesfriends.com according to the logo in the email) isn’t active yet, although similar domains redirect to www.whitedotbox.com which seems to be the same organisation and offers search income to sports clubs etc.

They promise changes over the next few days, in the meantime we can get paid to use Google.

I hope this continues to be a good service – I have over £30 accumulated so far!

[Update 2008-06-09:] The changeover has taken place – see my new post.

I wanted to be able to use the fantastic My Search Funds from my Google Homepage (iGoogle), so I decided to try my hands at creating my first Google Gadget.

It simply adds a My Search Funds search box to your iGoogle page. You can add the Google Gadget using the button below:

For those who don’t know, My Search Funds is a site that lets you earn a percentage of advertising revenue from your every day web searches. Currently the site uses Google, but they are developing their own aggregate search engine. You earn around 2 to 2.5p per search. Sign up here.

I’ve been using My Search Funds (the site that pays you to search) for a little while now. Up to now they have used Ask.com to provide the search results.

I was surprised today to find a Google results page when I searched. I thought I had selected the wrong search engine, but I checked, and I had used the correct search option. This is great if they are able to start to use Google, because the results are much better.

I checked the FAQ on the site, and it’s changed slightly. The wording is now:

“Our results are taken from Yahoo!, Windows Live Search and Ask (and shortly Google) and are presented to you based on how many of the search engines they appear in so we hope your results will be just as good if not better!”

This looks like they are going to use a combined results page, but no sign of that yet. I don’t know how this will affect the revenue share, but I doubt they would do anything to make them and us less money!

There was a “New Message” on my account today, but it was blank!

If Google is here to stay, there’s now even more reason to sign up for this service. My earnings are now coming up to £20 – the minimum payment level – and that’s after less than 2 months!

[Update]: I found a message on the search page:

New Improved Search Results!
Now you can use MySearchFunds to search three major Search Engines in one go! Shortly we will be adding Google to this and improving the presentation and speed of results so please stick with us.

SORRY!
We are having a few minor problems with our meta search service which should be resolved next week. In the meantime why not enjoy results from Google.

They also mention cashback shopping – in fact they are giving 50% of eBay’s revenue on winning bids already.

For those who don’t know, Yuwie is a new(ish) social networking site which shares a percentage of their ad revenue with its users. Sounds good in theory, so I thought I’d give it a try.

Yuwie seems to be based on the MySpace model, with each use having a profile, a photo gallery, a blog etc. You can customise your profile backgrounds and colours in the same sort of way as you do with Myspace (you can see my profile here). As a social networking site it seems pretty good, although there is nothing new. It used to be a bit slow due to the number of ads, but this seems to have got better, and the ads less annoying.

How much you earn depends on a few things. The number of “control panel” pages you view are counted, and so is how many times your profile is viewed by other members. Every month your total views gets multiplied by the monthly RSR (Revenue Sharing Rate), and then you get 10% of the total (I’ll explain why later).

Because the number of views your profile gets directly affects your earnings, everyone is very keen to make friends, in fact there are many “clubs” dedicated to getting more friends. People also advertise their blogs and pictures, in the hope they will get more referrals.

A lot of the content is based around making money online, but I have found some good stuff – for example I am a member of a group of arty people where people post their work – from poetry to ironwork and everything in between.

Now, you may remember I said you made 10% of the revenue for your views. This is because the rest is shared between the people who referred you up to 10 levels. This means a big way to make more money is to refer people of your own. in fact you earn the same percentage on your own views as you do the people 10 levels down, which means the real way to make money has got to be to recruit people and build up your tree – you could be completely inactive and still make lots of money.

Earnings

The Yuwie help pages give an estimated monthly earnings of over $10,000 dollars. This assumes everyone has 1,000 views and everyone refers 3 other people. It also assumes a slightly higher RSR than it was last month, but the sums add up.

So, I said I had my first full month, and so can reveal that my earnings for March were……

…$0.03

OK, so it’s not huge at all, but I’ve got no active referrals.

Recommendations

If you like social networking sites, give it a go, and treat it like any other social networking site: add your pics, customise your profile, make new friends, invite your friends.

Do not use it as a way to make money. Don’t add rubbish to your profile in the hope it will get a few more views (see my blog on Yuwie for an experiment I did with a different profile pic). There are lots of better ways to make money out there, probably including flipping burgers.

If you are good at inviting people and have lots of friends who like this sort of thing, then you may well make a bit of cash. I didn’t invite all my friends, because most of the people I know aren’t into this sort of thing.

The one thing I have found is that this isn’t a scam (I’ve seen evidence of payments), but you need to be realistic.

Use my referal link to sign up (or go straight to my profile to bypass the annoying sales pitch)

Additional note: a much better way to earn money for doing very little is My Search Funds – I’ve built up over £12 so far (see previous post).

There are loads of cashback sites around these days, offering money for doing things like completing surveys, shopping, or social networking, but this is a new one on me:

My Search Funds pays you to search the web! it uses Ask as its search engine, which seems pretty good (although I have to admit I didn’t use it before signing up to this). I signed up yesterday, did 15 searches in my first day, and found 35p in my account. This doesn’t sound much, but it would add up over time, and all I did was change the search engine I use. Another good thing is that there are no toolbars or spyware to add – it’s just another search engine to choose from the main search box in Firefox (presumably the same in IE).

Use my link to sign up and I get a small percentage of your revenue – this doesn’t mean you get any less though!