Inside the Free iPod Offer

jonathanhowell writes "David Lazarus, The SF Chronicle's tech guy, has an article in today's paper with an interesting investigation into the work you have to do to get a "free" (as in beer) iPod. I'm trying not to call it a scam, because it appears completely legal, if ethically challenged." From the article: "What it doesn't say is that the offer terms will expose you to reams of spam and marketing solicitations, that the user survey is actually a lengthy marketing ploy, and that the sponsor offers needed to qualify for that free music player will almost certainly cost you money."

Comments

Of course it costs you money!

[DietCoke]

As others have said, nothing is free.

Beyond that, is the deluge of spam and junk mail that you'll get worth saving a couple of hundred bucks? If you believe the studies that outline how much productivity (and thus time) is lost due to spam, it seems to me that you'll making a bad choice.

On the other hand, I'm probably not their target market anyhow. Enjoy the spam, folks - just don't bitch at me when you get it!

Doesn't "free" have a meaning?

[Anonymous Coward]

From the SlashDot article:

I'm trying not to call it a scam, because it appears completely legal, if ethically challenged.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if a person has to buy something, even from another company, to get a "free iPod", then advertising the iPod as "free" is false advertising, no? That makes me not so sure about that "completely legal" part.

Re:Doesn't "free" have a meaning?

[Robotech_Master]

With Gratis, you just have to do a trial offer and get your friends to do the same. The trial offer can require spending money (like an offer that involved a minimum purchase from an on-line pet store--but that was all right, I needed to nab some Frontline for the house panther anyway), or it may not. Some trial offers may even come with their own freebies, like the $20 gift card to Circuit City that I got for signing up with Buyer's Advantage.

But you don't send money to Gratis. You don't even pay for the shipping charges (which is good when your free TV set weighs in at 110 lbs).

Granted, as some people have said about Linux, it's only free (as in beer) if your time is worth nothing to you. But there's not necessarily any monetary expenditure involved.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:TINSTAAFL, indeed

[Pfhorrest]

Not to be a grammar Nazi (I probably can't even spell grammar), but "ain't" is a word, it's just depracated in modern English due to frequeny misusage (such as in the TANSTAAFL acronym). "Ain't" (or an't) is a contraction for "am not", and thus the only proper usage of it would be in the form of "I ain't...". "Is not..." and "are not.." are misusages. But technically, I ain't making any major errors in this sentance.

(And for those actual grammar Nazis out there, yes, beginning a sentance with "but" or "and" is technically acceptable as well, so don't come bitching at me about that last sentance. Or anything else for that matter. This post is offered "as is" with no guarantee of grammar, spelling, or factual correctness. YMMV).

Re:Worked for me

[JUSTONEMORELATTE]

Lacking mod points, I'll simply add a Me Too
Back when gmail was difficult to get, I gave gmail invites in exchange for completed referrals. I never promised that my referrals would get an iPod, just that I'd give them gmail if they helped me get mine.
For the iPod, I signed up for an offer (Netscape ISP) which I cancelled with no charges. I used a mail.com address, which hasn't been hit with any more spam than usual, and I haven't received any postal junk mail or phone solicitations.
I also did the same deal to get referrals on the freeDesktopPC site, and I got a decent Dell (2.8Ghz P4, works much better with an addtional $40 worth of RAM)
For that, I signed up with an offer that I find valuable -- inPhone directory assistance -- so I continue to use that service.
Again, no spam, no phone solicitations, no junk mail, no hassles.

It's a Ponzi scheme if you consider your time and signup fees to be a "cost of participating" in the program. It's a referral based program (multilevel for multi == 2) and so it'll tank eventually, leaving tons and tons of people without enough referrals to get the prize -- far more people will be disappointed than will ever get an iPod -- but I did my best to be honest with my referrals.


There are a bunch of knock-off sites, of course, but the gratis internet sites are exactly what they claim to be.
If it sounds reasonable to you and you want to give it a try, there are freeiPod links all over the place. Personally, I'd kind of like to get a free flat-panel monitor next.

Re:My experiences...

[0100010001010011]

First I'd like to say that I'm a bit skeptical of the story. Mainly the last line:
"I ended up selling it on eBay," Culbert said happily. "I got $400 for it. "
Freeipods.com only has the $299 20GB iPods. When I sold mine on ebay I couldn't get more than 280$ out of it.

My Experiences:
FreeiPods is by far the easiest to do. So far I've reciveed 7 iPods. Yes, I know this is against their policy, deal. My first one took the longest. I was afraid I'd never get 5 people so I cheated my way up to 5. By then it was August. I hit campus like a madman. I flyered everywhere. I hit up the "For Sale" newsgroup for campus. The refferrals just poured in.

But only for the iPods. No one seemed interested in anything else. I got my 27" TV, but just barely. I'm stuck at 6 for my FreePC. Flyering for DVD and PVP has been about useless. No one cares. The lure of the iPod is, "Oo iPod." Some people were dumb enough to sign up with their @university.edu account. MOST of my completed offers were dumb jock types.
I haven't recieved ANY spam from Gratis. I own my own domain so every account for everything has its own e-mail address. My experience with offercentric offers has not been the same. I am constantly getting junk mail for each of the individual accounts. I know that it had to have been a sale of e-mail addresses, because some of the accounts I hadn't even completed an offer for yet. Some times I'll get 5 pieces of SPAM at the exact same time. One delivered to each of my Offer Centric e-mail addresses.

It works. The novelty is dying off. But there are still people that still haven't heard of it yet. It takes some creative marketing to get it done, if you think by signing up you'll instantly get 5, think again.

Re:TINSTAAFL, indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

Heinlein has his entertaining spots and his creative spots, but so much of his writing is very, very preachy. Also, most of his characters, male or female, are very stereotypical... He wrote a lot of fiction though, and from what I remember of his reflective stuff he would be the first to admit that a lot of his fiction was pretty trashy. Among his books that I feel are pretty solid, are Friday, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, The Number of the Beast, and The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. Look at the main character of that last book, Heinlein used him to completely trash fiction writers. He also wrote many pretty good, heart-tugging, and interesting short stories. Definitely hit and miss! Some of his books are so perverted I can't really stand to read them anymore. But even for all my criticism, I'd rank him in my top 5 SF writers I go back to over and over.

I mean look at the story he wrote where he has a character have a sex change, go back in time, seduce himself, then drop the resulting love child (him) at an orphanage even further back in time. That's classic, imo. Heinlein wrote some very, very good stuff.

With my above opinion as qualification, I'd agree with your guys' opinion that Heinlein sucks.

Re:Obvious

[Pollardito]

so the person with the "free XBox" sig chimes in to say "of course THOSE sites are a scam, but sites like the one in my sig aren't!"

Re:It's a pyramid scheme

[houghi]

Whether you consider the Pyramid Scheme a scam, is up to you.

For me it is not up to me. I live in Belgium and the governement has made a law that makes Pyramid Sc(e)ams illegal

The article is pure FUD

[vincey37]

First of all, the company profiled, Incentive Reward Center, is not the freeiPod company. They aren't even on the radar. Gratis Internet operates the most well known freeiPod site, while OfferCentric comes in second. Both are reputable companies that have good track records shipping products and providing customer service. Secondly, the author compains about spam. Both Gratis and Offercentric do not spam your email addresses. I have had over twenty people do referrals under me with these two corporations and have had no trouble. Finally, there is the issue of paying for offers. This is a total non starter because you know the terms of each offer before you choose to complete it! There are several free offers, including the easy eFax, which even allows cancellations within the 14 day trial to be done online. I can confirm eFax does not spam either. Is getting free stuff from these sites difficult? Yes. Is it feasible? Definately. Don't let this poorly researched article scare you away if you're dedicated.

let's clear up a few things

[Anonymous Coward]

I am employed by the subject of the article.

This is not a scam; we do ship out loads of free ipods and other goodies. You will have to sign up for offers. That's just how it works.

We're completely legit, and no one is holding a gun to your head to get you to sign up.

Sometimes people will qualify for their ipod, send in their certificate for redemption, and not see any change on the status page. This occurs due to the very large amount of requests. Hopefully, we'll get your ipod or whatever out to you much faster in the future, but don't worry - you WILL get your gift.

It was mentioned that our terms and conditions mention a check will be substituted in some cases. If that happens, the check will be equal to the retail value of the item.

Mr. Lazarus's article is laughable at best, slanderous and potentially damaging to a legal and legitimate enterprise at worst. These programs are obviously not for everyone - but for many, they get to check out a few services that they may or may not use (it introduces some people to the video rental by net/mail thing), and gets them a free ipod in the process.

I'm a pretty moral person and wouldn't work someplace that scammed people or didn't send out the gifts they were promised. Doing so would be wrong and very possibly have undesireable criminal consequences. To sum things up, great care is taken so that anyone who signs up, qualifies for a gift by completing the offers, and goes through the process *will* get a gift, period.

Posting AC for obvious reasons.

Cost of Time

[sexistentialist]

People fail to realize that their time has value. The chump who got his $400 ipod in exchange for lots of pain with opening and closing accounts, shelling out some cash, arguing with vendors, using bunk email addresses so as not to drown beneath the deluge of spam, and so on, probably spent 40 hours overall. If you subtract the $75 from $400 and divide the remainder by 40, you end up with a cost per hour of about $8.13. I suppose that you could argue that taxes and such make the Ipod worth more, or the hours worth less, or something, but I would counter with the cost of the pain of having to deal with all of these issues.

Another way to look at it is to compare the cost of those hours against the cost of doing something else, from an overall well-being perspective. Perhaps instead of spending 40 hours fenagling a free Ipod from some shyster in Florida the chump would have a higher quality of life doing something he actually liked.

Maybe people just undervalue their time.

Maybe people just get obsessed with the idea of "free."

"You don't get owt for nowt"

[crivens]

The old addage holds true now just as much as it always has:

"You don't get owt for nowt".

If you think otherwise, you're either stupid or I'm missing something really obvious that could make me a lot of money.

Open request from Slashcode editors (on this topic

[Ilgaz]

Please guys, gals... Modify the lameness filter so the signatures having sort of referrer in the URL doesn't pass.

I don't care if its scam or real. They give us no choice than disabling legit signatures displayed.

This thing goes bigger each day. Stop before it becomes crisis.

Re:I wrote about this a while back, too...

[Ilgaz]

You should also write an essay about the amazing lowing profile of Slashdot users.

See all those lame iPod signatures with referrer? Thats what I talk about. Look when did they subscribe. Look if there is a single 5 digit guy/gal having that signature.

Yep, that's what I talk about.

From now on, I admit I will overrate all posts mentioning that lame free iPod. I don't think anything useful/insightful will come out from a guy/gal is so low to abuse signature system of slashdot for a free (!) thing in return.

I never abused slashdot for years and thats why I have excellent karma. That should give something back to me.

I don't have to view anything except Slashdot ads while using this site.