Search engines and sweepstakes go together like computers and the Internet. ANNA JANE GROSSMAN keeps her eyes on the Blingo prize.
Work ethic might get you far in this country, but who doesn't love getting something for nothing?
Spend just a few minutes a day browsing the Web, and it seems like a real possibility; all you have to do is find a site with a pop-up offering an iPod shuffle in exchange for shooting a virtual duck, right?
Using the Web to gamble and enter sweepstakes is a form of financial planning that isn't that foreign to many. According to Nielsen's NetRatings, some 30 million U.S. Web users went to a gambling or sweepstakes site in March alone.
But scroll through most sites that offer free goods or money, and you'll soon find that getting something for nothing takes more work than you'd think. In most cases, if you don't sign up for one of the offers, the window telling you how to claim that free iPod will never appear.
Unless, of course, you want to just enter your credit card number. Or phone number. Or all your friends' email addresses.
In short, you might get that iPod at the end of your journey, but you'll likely lose your soul.
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TOO TRUE TO BE GOOD?
A handful of companies, however, are really giving users something for doing nothing by combining two of the most common reasons people use the Internet: searching and winning.
Exhibit A is the search engine Blingo.com, a site that recently entered Nielsen's list of the top ten visited gambling and sweepstakes destinations. Here you'll find the same search results that you'd get using Google, but with one key difference: Users who search at the times closest to secret, randomly selected milliseconds designated by the site each day will instantly earn a prize -- anything from a $5 gift certificate to a car to $20,000 in cash.
Better yet, it requires no personal information. All it takes is a mailing address -- after all, if you win something, they've got to have a place to send the goods, right?
"We're the white hat of this industry," says the company's founder, Frank Anderson of San Francisco.
Anderson, who previously helped launched the internet company iAmaze, came up with the idea to bring a prize element to search engines in 2004. Unlike most give-away sites, all Blingo's revenue comes from the advertisers who pay for the Google-generated small ads on the top and bottom of the pages.
The income, Anderson explained, is split between his company and Google (many sites, including AOL, use Google's search engines and split profits in the same way. Similar prize-offering search sites, like iWon.com, partner with other search engines in a similar manner).
In Blingo's case, a percentage of the company's profit share goes toward giveaways and prize money.
To date, he says, the site has given away close to a $1 million.
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PLAYING BLINGO
For the sake of research, I decided I needed to win my own free iPod (or $20,000, as the case may be).
So I switched my homepage to Blingo for a week.
I also enlisted 10 friends to use the site, too -- if a prize is won by someone you refer, you win the same thing as the referee. I was a little disappointed that Blingo has no Google News or Froogle equivalent, since I use those two features of Google rather often, but for basic searches, the site worked like a charm -- except for the fact that I consistently didn't win.
I even typed in random words while watching TV just hoping that I'd get lucky, but no dice. What's more, my friends and family were slow adapters; the process was so simple that some of them couldn't wrap their heads around it.
My mom only recently mastered Google, and Blingo-ing proved to much of a challenge to understand even though it's no harder to use.
"I keep searching for 'flat-screen TV'," she said, "but I haven't won one yet."
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THE USERS GET LUCKY SOMETIMES
Was this really working for people? Apparently.
Kim Holmes, a 31-year-old from Huntsville, Ala., wins several times a month.
"I've actually won so many things at this point that I've lost track!" she said.
The trick, according to Holmes, was putting a link to the site on her blog, MissZoot.com, and suggesting that her readers sign up as her friend. Close to 500 of her blog visitors have signed up to date.
"Consumers have this fantasy of winning something, even if it's something small, and they can generate an amazing amount of excitement about that prize," said Anderson. "When something has been won, its value suddenly is beyond calculation, even if the thing's actual value is only $10."
That's the case with Holmes' husband. He's a Blingo user, but he has far fewer "friends" than his wife -- and therefore has fewer chances to win. So he was a little miffed when she woke him up in the middle of the night a few weeks ago to inform him that she'd just won $5,000, thanks to one of the people she'd referred.
Said Holmes: "He's only won one movie ticket so far -- but he's very proud of it."
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asap contributor Anna Jane Grossman is a freelance writer based in New York.
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