Thread: Reward TV. Craptastic

I've heard a lot complain about RewardTV and found this article. Hope you get some laughs and if you are like this former member, you should be complaining. Nielsen is making a ton of $$$ from every member. I won over $600 last year, but I'm sure they made much more from the time I spend on the games, surveys, etc. Here's the article:


I joined RewardTV back in college. That was when I was still looking for places that forked out extra cash, even if it was only $1 here and $1 there. If I remember right, I joined through another, and infinitely more awesome program, MyPoints.

Whatever the case, I quickly (very quickly) grew bored with RewardTV. It was monotonous and time consuming for essentially NO reward. That's right. Don't let the name fool you. I quit. For years. Until one day MyPoints or some other site emailed me about RewardTV again and I thought, "Hey, maybe it's different this time. Maybe it won't suck as much."

Ah, sometimes optimism just doesn't win.

The Idea
The basic concept of RewardTV is that you watch TV, and the next day, log on to the site and take fun little TV quizzes. There are other quick surveys as well, but the goal is to build up points in order to earn stuff. Yep. That's it. Sounds quick, easy, and fun right?

Wrong. Well, at least, it's quick, easy, and fun for the first few days. Then you'll feel more like a zombie and, on occasion, want to throw things.

Earning Points
The general surveys pop up about every week or so and you can earn as much as 7,500 points for each one. But most of the time, you'll earn your points through your TV watching.

Mind you, only certain shows at certain times and on certain channels are displayed. This is because not everyone receives, say, SpikeTV and watches Ultimate Fighter like I do. Though how they're getting SciFi is beyond me. And I honestly think that there are WAY too many shows displayed for the f-ing SPEED channel. But that's just me. Most of what you'll find is primetime television as well as movies. Question numbers range depending upon the show, with as many as 20 for hour shows and movies to as few as 12 for half-hour shows. Each question is multiple choice, and for every correct answer you receive 100 points. Huzzah. You only get to take 5 quizzes per day, so choose wisely.

I hope you paid attention to the commercials, because they ask about those too. A lot of "bonus" questions will pop up, so the more you know about a commercial, the better, because the bulk of your winnings often comes from commercials. Answering right on the first question can get you as many as 4 or 5 bonus questions. It's tedious though, and often I find myself just hitting random buttons to move on. Sometimes I get it right, others I don't. Either way, I pretty much quit caring. If I had to choose a percentage in terms of questions, I'd say about 40% is of the show and the other 60% is commercial crap.

Another method is to watch TV online. I don't know how they track this, but sometimes it shows up, others it doesn't. You usually get about 12 questions or so. You can actually do the online shows in addition to the television quizzes, so even if you've already done the max 5 quizzes for TV, you can still do more online shows. I'm not sure what the limit is because I don't think I've gone past four at a time. I'm not going to melt my brain just for a bunch of extra quizzes and points (and you'll see why in a minute).

The So-Called Rewards
Sure, I'm a disgruntled user, but I have my reasons.

The "rewards" are, in fact, pretty weak. Once you earn enough points (and honestly, do so ANYTHING on this site, you'll need at least a million. Good luck) you can start using them (sort of).

First, you can use your points to buy entries into sweepstakes. The point entries range from 500 to 3,000. So if you're feeling lucky and want RewardTV to pay your car loan, go for it, but every entry will cost you 3,000 points. There are also random sweepstakes that you get entered into just for playing the games. At present these include: $500 Weekly drawing, a not-quite-monthly $10,000 Your-Way, a month's supply of movie tickets (weekly), and a 10-pack of movie tickets (weekly). Once again, good luck.

If that doesn't catch your fancy, then you can try to win and auction. Have I said "good luck" enough yet? Auctions include a wide variety of items, from magazines to DVDs to high-priced goodies like PS3's and iPods. Of course, in order to even come close to winning anything, you'll need way, way over a million points. I have almost 2 million now and made a bid for an Ironman DVD just for kicks (I knew I wasn't going to win). I left my bid off at around 1,140,000. The current bid is now 2,260,923. And the auctions don't end until the end of the month, so I'm willing to bet that it's going to go up from there. I've seen a $50 Amazon.com gift certificate auction for over 11 million points. A Nintendo DS Lite is, as of today, going for 8,401,000 after 82 bids and I can guarantee you it won't end there.

Lastly, you can join in on the madcap Shopping Spree which is nothing more than God knows how many people frantically clicking their mouse buttons at a designated time in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, they'll be one of the lucky ones to get a $5 Burger King gift certificate. You sit and wait at your computer until the page refreshes at just the right time (there's a big countdown timer and once it hits zero, they automatically refresh, but FYI, if your computer isn't Superman fast, by the time it's refreshed, the prizes will be gone, trust me), then click a "Redeem Now" button and hope you've slipped through all the other people to win. They only have limited amounts of cards, from 15 to no more than 75, and I've not seen any gift card amount over $10. They cost you 150,000 or 300,000 points and occur about twice a week.

And that's it. Those are the rewards.

My Turn
Oh, it's possible to win on RewardTV. I know it has to be true because those gift cards go somewhere, and I did win, but that was years ago when I first joined. That was when they did $50 A Day Giveaway and sure enough, I got an email one day telling me I won. I got the check, and I got my $50. So yes, it is possible to win.

It just takes f-ing forever.

What I don't understand is how people obtain all these points when, after a year, your points expire. That's right kids. If you sit around all the time and amass points, after a year has gone by, they're gone. Kaput. All that hard work flushed down the drain. And people are on here with over 10 million points! What are these people doing?? I can only assume that they have no lives or are just really, really, really, hard up for a Slumdog Millionaire Blu-ray disc.

Frankly, I think RewardTV is ripping all of us users off. It's crap. In fact, the Nielson Company (you know, the one that does all the TV survey stuff?) owns RewardTV, so they're getting a ton of free information - knowing what we watch, when we watch it, how much of it we remember, what we remember of commercials, how much we liked those commercials, and so on, all without giving up much of anything. If they can fork over $10,000 in a sweepstakes so often, I say they should reinvest that money into gift cards and allow us to cash out for them. Everyone wins.

In short, you can win, but it will take a looooong time of hoping your cards play out right and that you can earn enough points to "buy" something at auction before your time is up and your points expire. That is, if you don't go nuts first, taking time to answer questions over and over and over (though some people do enjoy that sort of thing). Ultimately, RewardTV is a massive waste of time. You'd be more rewarded by getting a bag of popcorn and watching your favorite show without being quizzed on it later.

I quit this site once. Now I remember why.

Recommended:
No

BUMP: The site stalls something terrible!

I disagree with some of things you said. The shopping spree most of the time are really easy at least for me. If I wanted a $5 gift card I say I have at least a 60-70% chance of getting it. Now the others are a bit hard.

But I managed to get a $10 gift card and $25 gift card sometimes. Since July this year I got $70 worth of gift cards. Of course I got over $100 this year but I can't tell you how much exactly since rewardtv deletes the points spent pages often.

For the auctions you are right. I don't waste my time on them. The time it takes to build all those points isn't worth it and I be very concern if rewardtv took those huge amount of points away from you.

It has been stalling terrible for me too. After the last question it can take up to 10 minutes to go back to my list and a lot of times if I refresh it logs me out and it can take 15 or more minutes to log back in. I'm really bad about remembering when sprees are but I get a lot of nice things in the auctions. It is just frustrating when it is so slow. I wonder how many of us it is happening to?

Yea it happen to me too it's not just the last question sometimes when I just go on to the site it just lags really bad I switch to firefox and it worked. Chrome was still trying to access the page.

I am done with RewardTV. I rarely even log in to the site. I currently have -3,204,200 points on my account. This website is a complete waste my time. They, like ever company in exist, do not really take about the people who use their products. They are leeches sucking on our free time that could be used in a productive way. But hey we fall for it because they give out rewards that are more or less hard to obtain. The point is that to win it takes time. I would also NEVER recommend this website to anyone and hope you guys will someone day realize how bad rewardtv really is.

I also participate in online survey as member of a myriad of survey panels. This is a bigger waste of my time. I'm in the process of unsubscribing from this websites since their overall payout has decreased and many panels are now combining as one like Global Opinions Panel and I-say.