This post had a massive shitfest with formatting due to an embed not being whitelisted, then totally screwing up everything when I removed it. It should be fixed now, but please let me know if something looks weird. It's really hard to read typos when you're not quite sure what order all the words were in to begin with! Lol.
I was encouraged to share this by @Troisnyx earlier today, and boy am I excited!
'"[Why are there so few] music videos here on Newgrounds based on tracks from the audio portal? It would be such a great opportunity for both musicians and animators to be known more, and it would also be a great way to experiment... [So] many interesting tracks go undiscovered until someone has a visual reference to [work with]." -@ForgottenDawn
@ForgottenDawn made a post here that brought up an interesting idea -- a prospective competition for animators: make music videos for music on Newgrounds. I want to see this happen. If you do too, check out the nifty little poll on that newspost and make yourself heard. Depending on the outcome, there will either be a collab or contest! Exciting!
@TomFulp has weighed in down in the comment section about the possibility that if there were such a competition, we may be able to get some third-parties to do promotionals for us, which sounds absolutely fantastic. If this turns out to be a thing, I will certainly make a podcast and share to my Twitter/FB crowd, so that's a good 2-3k people, more if I ask my friends to share, who will know about this competition.
Just remember not to try and embed it if you choose to share as well, because it isn't in the whitelist and it will be frustrating, as it was for me a minute ago when the embed fouled up and wrecked my post formatting, forcing me to rewrite my entire post like I just had to a minute ago, lol. Instead, just link directly. Some good music to be discovered in the process, as well.
Please spread the word to those you think would be interested. Mention people in comments, tweet it, send carrier pidgeons, w/e. Everyone on ForgottenDawn's post will certainly thank you!
Also, and speaking of Tom, there's a question for you down there somewhere below that giant white picture but before I start talking about XBL Rewards. @NightRaid-NG, you were excited about that Xbox embed I tested last post I wrote, so you might like this!
Beyond this point, I'll be talking about upcoming projects and what I've been up to lately -- how I've been making money while I sleep, play Skyrim, and otherwise do nothing... Literally, I made 3 cents while I warmed up my coffee, so stick around if you have some room in your wallet for a few extra dollars or at least want to know a little bit about how I do it. I won't be posting scams or sites that require you to enter your credit card information either, and I will only cover sites I use daily.
First, projects, since this is relatively short. I've got 2 podcasts recorded, one, my NG AP Mod podcast which I'm editing -- I'm waaay late grinding this one out; absolutely insane week involving feeding a homeless kitten some sauer kraut-y sausage at freak o'clock one night -- the other, an interesting little tidbit about Microsoft rewards, a popular sort of GPT/PTC program that offers giftcards in exchange for using Bing search for a few minutes daily.
Just need to finalize the edits and post. Someone kick me until I do. I've had one of these on my mind for so long. I'm gonna drop a little sneak peek or 3 down below.
Note the Amazon gift card in this image, which you can get on MS Rewards with a little patience and a Windows Live ID -- and I don't mean grinding your ass off all day long at the PC kind of patience and an actual Windows machine. It just takes a few minutes a day to rack up free moolah with Bing. If you're looking for stuff from the Windows store or Xbox, note that any Microsoft products are at a 10% discount once you reach level 2, comparison below.
Just don't be lured into spending any money at their store for the paltry 1 point per dollar spent in the Windows store (1 cent for every 10 dollars) and you'll be on track to savings and freebies. I've scored gift cards this way for less than 10 minutes a day. No worthless spam emails, either. 9/10 emails are spritzed with free money you can get as simple as opening a link in a new tab. In fact, I racked up most of the 3,755 points you see above from emails alone.
It's a sweet deal, considering it's another several dollars every month toward my earnings with practically no effort from my part except for things I was already going to do anyway. I don't think MS has blacklisted Newgrounds, so there's that.
@TomFulp, now that I mentioned it, do you think Bing Ads might be a good alternative for NG?
I know we've been orphaned countless times by ad companies partnering up with AdSense, and I think the last people to do that might be Google's rival, MS. It look like Bing Ads has some adult advertisers, and doesn't seem to discourage teh pron, which I think you mentioned was a problem with Google that we had a while back. I could be wrong, but it's an exciting prospect to me.
Moving on but still on the subject of Microsoft programs, if you play Xbox, check out Xbox Live Rewards. If you don't get sucked into spending anything on the cashback gimmick side of the site, it becomes a small but guaranteed risk free income for your MS account with some perks like product discounts if you're a gold member.
This combined with Microsoft Rewards has been my saving grace since 2010. Every penny helps in this age of overpriced 99 cent tack-on prices, and if Microsoft is willing to pay us to use its products and support the game devs and publishers we want in the process, let it.
I always set a calendar reminder to check once a month and do the minute long survey for 25 cents every month. This, despite being a paltry $3 dollars per year by itself has really come in handy. Plus, MS actually seems to pay attention to the results of the surveys and the overall quality of the program has improved substantially in the past 7 years.
My Advice: If you like saving every penny possible, this is an absolute must. If you're already a heavy spender on XBL, it might cut you some costs too with all sorts of discounts and cash back. Just make sure you have it credit as soon as you reach 1000 accumulated credits ($1) so you don't end up patiently waiting longer than the usual 4 months to see your 3.4 minutes of clicking go to work.
Now, if we're talking "money for nothing", I'll be honest, my stress level is down from the past few months now that I have some relatively passive extra income -- passive being, the stuff runs all day while I go about my life, practically forgetting about it unless I'm coming back to check earnings maybe every hour and a half and sure nothing died. If I'm feeling adventurous, I might actually put in some effort and help it along a little.
Now, you might be wondering, how does anyone get paid not to work? Celebrities excluded?
Well, it's pretty simple. I'm using several GPT sites on extra devices, ipads, computers, old cellphones with wifi capability, etc., so I don't have to switch tabs or worry about offers not crediting because they're not "visible" onscreen or whatever bs GPT sites are cooking up these days thanks to ad companies being extra scroogey. No surveys, no trial offer crap that could land me in deep monetary doo-doo, or worse, get my identity stolen.
Still, several people have asked how I do it, what it's like, how much I'm making, etc., because they're doing all of these things and more to try and make money, but they're still making diddly squat, and worse, they're burning out, sometimes before they even get paid.
Now, I'll tell you, between several sites, I'm actually making a pretty good amount, certainly not enough to buy a yacht, but enough to do what I want to with it, with less than an hour of actual work per day. If I were working a day job 5 days a week, actually putting in effort, or doing stupid surveys I hate, the wages would be awful, but this runs relatively continuously, all day and all night, and I have all the time in the world to spend on work, play, or whatever crazy home improvement project I deem fit. In fact, once I can afford hosting, I plan to run my own website -- the official kind, not the Weebly or Webs or Wix-ever else kind of freemium stuff is out there.
Meantime, my spare computer/tablet/phones sit untouched while I do whatever I want, and all they do is take up some bandwidth, sitting on mute with the screensavers and timers off, waiting on me to see fit to check them. Even if you only have one or two devices, nothing's stopping you from letting this stuff run while you sleep, work, or go to school, anything.
Take this sample from letting my junk computer run one site all day below. $12.24 in a couple days, just running in the background, and 11 more cents in the time it took me to type this section. This is just one site out of many that I've found easy to take advantage of the perks -- namely, 17 cents worth of bonus cash daily that you can get in minutes just by checking your email and doing a PTC that, while you have to wait a minute or two, is easy to do first thing when you wake up, and you can even check the weather through it or start it up earning you money until the PTC is ready to credit.
You'll notice almost all of my credits are videos aside from the daily bonuses, a ton of them, actually. There's a reason behind that, and it certainly isn't because I sat through all! It was an absolute eureka, finally-something-really-works, slap your grandma kind of moment, especially after so many other GPT's have given me the runaround or outright treated me like dirt, or just flat out not had anything decent to offer.
Before FusionCash, I was so tired of GPT sites, PTC bullshit that didn't credit, sites like Points2Shop and CrowdFlower that denied me payment or closed my account for bogus reasons even after I proved my identity, good will, etc., I was hopeless, until I took some advice from a blogger with a pseud that read something like "no-bs-getpaidto", and went on to sign up for with his referral link. Through this referral and my hatred of surveys, slideshows, tasks, and dangerous spam app installs, I discovered a miracle I wouldn't have otherwise.
I'm going to walk you through it.
If you click the picture, it'll take you to the FC signup, where you can make a couple extra dollars without touching your computer more than a few times a day -- obviously more if you have more than one device, feel like messing around with more sites, or if you can figure out some that will auto refresh without checking if the pages are on top or some other nonsense on other sites. This is exactly what I love about the method I use with FusionCash; they don't pester me and we both get paid, except I don't have to be present because of that first part.
If you just signed up, go ahead and set up your account real quick with either your Paypal info or address, and when you finish, you're ready to earn. After you get your $5 signup bonus, go to Earn Cash >> Videos. You'll see a teal play button pop up. Click it.
This will open a new window. Scroll down and click the teal button, which will open another window. Slide the first popup so that you can see the timer under the second one, resize both as necessary, and click the tab without the timer so that it thinks it's on top. This is so you can make sure you're going to be credited and everything is proceeding normally. If the timer isn't going and the page isn't auto-refreshing, it's not working.
Note, sometimes it's a holy terror and insists on being a certain size or being on top of every tab despite being fully visible. This is why I just started using it on a spare device on mute that I absolutely do not touch except to check that it's still making me money whenever I feel like it, which turned out to be a pretty nice arrangement once I got past the minor annoyance, and it's a great addition to my GPT empire.
Tip: If I'm feeling like being more involved, I set a 30 minute timer to enter a CAPTCHA every so often on "radio loyalty" which I leave running on the closest device to me for an extra 6 cents an hour; it does add up in the scheme of things, and it has the bonus of helping me keep track of time. I turn off this timer while I sleep, obviously.
That's pretty much the same principle I apply to all the other sites. Anything that doesn't auto refresh itself, I don't do. If it does refresh itself but checks if I'm paying attention, I measure how long it takes to do that the next time I start it up and set timers accordingly -- If I feel like it. Otherwise, I keep my devices close to me on mute and use multiple sites, and just sorta let them go until they're done. Some of these sites have caps on each opportunity, most of which increase after meeting them a couple days in a row, and after they cap out, I check what else there is to do, if there are any bonuses, etc. There's been plenty of times I woke up from a nap or went shopping and came back to some dollars.
Just imagine, if every hour of the day for the rest of your life you were finding a couple dollars on the ground everywhere you went. Wouldn't that be sweet? Imagine that on top of a decent paying job, and all you have to do is get out of bed and have an email, paypal, etc., to get it. That's what this is like.
Just remember, never do two offers from the same affiliate company across two GPT sites or you could get banned by that affiliate, thus missing out on earnings, and never do two offers at the same exact time on the same exact site, same reasoning, only you could lose everything you earned. If you do everything right and still somehow manage get screwed with this method (has never happened to me as long as I followed those two rules in over 10 years), if the only thing you invest is a couple minutes of setting up something to run all day while you don't pay it any mind, you haven't lost anything, imo.
Now, I think I've rattled on enough about things I think are cool. Do check out @ForgottenDawn's post and spread the word if you like, do know I'm working on those damn belated podcasts, and if you feel like you could use some extra money, do join FusionCash. I simply shared it since I feel it's one of the fairest, easiest sites to work, and I haven't run into a single offer that it was FusionCash's fault that I wasn't credited for, unlike Points2Shop and several other sites that scammed me out of my time and took my money.
If people would like me to do an actual review or a how-to of this or other sites, lemme know, and yes, feel free to refer me to sites if you think they're good!
Also, happy shamrock celebration month. For your pleasure, something a little more or less cool (pun) than the weather, depending on where you live -- and certainly no less commercialized if the ads on the weather channel are any indicator...
McDonalds has some sweet frappes special right now that on the surface seem shitty and wildly overpriced (c'mon, it's McD's) but I actually enjoyed -- mint chocolate chip or something with little green sprinkles for Saint Patty's Day. Apparently I was the first one to order this where I live because the high school students working for minimum wage in there spent a good 10 minutes trying to figure out how the fuck to make it and even had to get on the phone at one point. Check it!
