MyPoints - An online work-for-pay site that actually pays

As you can see from the first slide, MyPoints is still paying out.

I've been with them many years, and could have made more if I really focussed, but sometimes I get busy so I just do a little bit each day, like answering a simple poll or quickly going to a website. They don't monopolize your time or demand attention every hour.

But if you're looking for "points website" or "easy work online" or to "get paid doing surveys", then first you have to set your expectations correctly. It's definitely not a "get rich quick" scheme.

• If you spend money at a reputable online merchant (e.g., Best Buy, Walmart), chances are it's on their list of affiliates and they can get you a rebate. That is the surest way to "earn money" -- by basically saving money. There is no magic money that appears out of thin air -- not for you and not for the points site so they can pay you.
• They cannot retroactively get you a rebate. You must go to the vendor website on MyPoints before you go to checkout and finish your purchase.
• If you want to get paid doing surveys, realize that a lot of people are trying to exploit and scam surveys by putting in nonsense answers to quickly zoom through a survey and get the reward.
• So websites offering surveys try to only pay out when a survey is legitimately completed.
• What this means is it will take a lot of survey attempts to get any meaningful money.
• If you're looking for easy "work" online such as watching videos, MyPoints WILL credit you points. But very little. Maybe 2 points for one to three minutes of watching, and you need around 4200 points to get $25 CAD deposited into your PayPal. Also the amount of points you can earn from just videos is quite small, so you'll want to try other things too, like Surveys.

So... why am I still recommending MyPoints?

• They DO pay. In this way they are reputable.
• I DO shop online SOMETIMES, like buying cheap things off AliExpress. And AliExpress does give you points as long as you make sure MyPoints knows about it.
• I inch up my points slowly over time doing simple things when I have time and multitask when I have less time. For example, as I typed this blog post, I had their "Watch videos" task up in another window and they it was advertising their affiliate, Swagbucks.

I'm sure a lot of people are wondering, "Can I make points without spending any money?" Well, yes. I've attached a snippet of my recent points (slide 2). You can see most of the points are basically from their website activities and I haven't spent any money recently.

Rebates

If you have a Dividend VISA card you get maybe a 1% or 2% rebate on certain purchases at the end of the year. MyPoints works similarly except you get paid in maybe a month.

Example:

• A $25 USD Paypal deposit is 3960 points, or 158.8 points per $1 USD.
• A $25 CAD Paypal deposit is 4200 points, so, uh, don't choose that one. <.<
• Buying something from Walmart pays 2 Points per dollar spent. This is basically a 1.26% rebate.
• And you can still use your Dividend VISA card to pay for the purchase.

On slide 3 you can see around August of last year I did buy something off AliExpress, and I fortunately remembered to make sure I started by going to AliExpress from the  MyPoints website. So I did get points credit. Not a lot as you can see, but I didn't spend gobs of money at AliExpress either (that's the point of going to AliExpress -- to buy cheaper and spend less). MyPoints can't retroactively give you points.

In comparison, last year I bought an Oculus Quest 2 from BestBuy. I completely forgot all about MyPoints and instead walked to the store, so I missed out on quite a lot of points, obviously.

Surveys

Surveys seem to be quite attractive to people, so let me share my experience of surveys in MyPoints. A successfully completed survey can give around 100 points, or approximately 60 cents.

• There's a lot of surveys you can do but as I mentioned, they try to screen out exploiters.
• SOME surveys on MyPoints DO properly give me the credit as listed when completed. So I can't say every survey is glitched. Some days, it goes smoothly.
• SOME surveys DO screen me out after the initial demographic questions, and that's fair. MyPoints does give me 5 points credit for at least trying it.
• However, for the screening, I don't feel they are doing a great job of this as I have felt I fully completed several surveys -- gone past the are-you-a-real-person questions and the are-you-really-reading-the-questions questions -- and started to answer product questions on the survey... And yet at the end they claim I was disqualified. (But they still paid out 5 points for the "attempt").
• Not really sure what can be done here as I have messaged them several times about it but gotten cut-and-paste answers that didn't help.
• So if you're hoping to make hundreds of points quickly answering surveys -- don't count on it. The key is "quickly" -- the more impatient you are, the longer it feels.
• Instead of sitting down and doing a bunch of surveys hoping to get a few dollars paid out, I recommend you do surveys when you can multitask or are otherwise idle. There's no real time limit on doing each survey.

Coupons

Another way to earn some points per month is to print coupons. They have lots of coupons for brand name products (examples on slides 4 and 5). There are lots of coupons for cosmetics, it seems, but some for food and a fair variety.

You get a tiny amount of points for printing them, and some points if you actually use a coupon. As with all coupons, you have to put in the effort to check if there's a coupon for what you want, and then actually remember to apply it at the till.

If you do decide to give MyPoints a try, please use my referral code https://www.mypoints.com?rb=22014608. Thank you.

Swagbucks

MyPoints lists Swagbucks as their affiliate, and they might be more closely related than just an "affiliate" so watch out for duplicated activities that won't reward you for both sites. Also, the interface they use for various activities looks almost identical in some cases.

• For example, grocery receipt uploads -- I uploaded a receipt to Swagbucks and got credit. When I tried to upload the receipt to MyPoints, I was informed the receipt had already been uploaded. (And I did NOT try to scam them by re-taking the photo and trying to upload the same receipt).
• Another example: Watching videos. I had exhausted all the videos I could watch on MyPoints for the day. When I tried to watch videos for points on Swagbucks, it notified me there was nothing available.