Beware of High Minimum Payouts

As an online earner, you probably want your payouts as quickly as possible. The "ideal" site, then, is one that has no minimum payout and pays instantly...good luck finding it. On the other hand, site owners have a difficult time keeping enough cash on hand to pay everyone immediately, plus the process of making payments (which includes checking for cheaters) can be time consuming. Thus, there are definitely legitimate reasons why a site may have a high minimum payout. However, a high minimum payout can also be a cover for a scam or a waste of time.

If I followed a strict "no high minimum payout" rule, I would be a poorer man today: Google AdSense, Inbox Dollars, and Global Test Market all make you earn a lot of money before you can request your payout. So a blanket rule isn't what you need. Instead, you need to consider each site in context. For a site with a high minimum to be worthwhile, you need to be able to earn enough to reach payout in a reasonable time frame. Global Test Market, for instance, is a survey site which can pay several dollars per survey. It's not that hard to reach payout under those circumstances (though the site may be a waste of time for people in countries that rarely get surveys). In contrast, there is a site called E-Mail Pays U which I joined very early on in my online earning adventures. Its minimum payout is a whopping $75 for your first payment. You make money there by reading emails at 2 cents an email plus three cents in daily clicks if you remember to visit the site each day. The problem is you don't get paid emails daily and sometimes not even weekly. While there are occasional offers to complete and you receive $10 to start out with, let it suffice to say that earning $75 there requires a multi-year commitment. I'm happy to recommend Global Test Market, especially to Americans, because I know it's quite possible to reach that $50 payout a couple times a year. I don't normally recommend E-Mal Pays U to anyone, though, because I can't imagine too many people would want to click for 4+ years before getting paid.

Scams are even worse than wastes of time. Readbud is one that has recently fooled lots of people -- they were able to make who knows how much money by showing articles with ads to thousands of "article readers." The high minimum payout of $50 meant that people read and read and read just to try to reach the minimum...the site was able to squeeze their scammed users for as much as they were worth! Readbud was particularly clever in the way it made it harder to earn the closer people got to payout. That made it so fewer people were running around calling it a scam as they couldn't say for sure that site didn't pay...they just hadn't reached payout yet. To avoid scams like these, research is pretty much your only hope. In addition to reading what other people are saying about the site, you should also try to figure out how the site supposedly MAKES money -- it has to get paid before it pays you. Readbud's "business model" never really made sense to me and I felt from day one they were promising to pay more than they could reasonably be expected to make. If a site doesn't pass the "smell test," there's a good chance that something really is iffy about it.