For years, I’ve participated in a barely-legitimate, yet remarkably popular (and probably well-known) spam-for-pay “program” wherein advertisers pay some pittance to the organizing company, which in turn sends me spam that, oddly enough, I’m supposed to filter into a special folder so I can give each and every one enough attention to click the “redemption” button that gives me “tokens” (that’s not the word they actually use for them, by the way) that I can later redeem for gift cards and such.

In terms of “something for nothing,” now that (thanks largely to GMail) I’ve gotten this thing nearly completely automated, it’s paying in spades. I’ve probably been sent over $200 in gift cards from these people in the past 5 years or so I’ve been a member and I’ve never spent a fucking dime at any of the sponsors’ web sites.

You’ll note I’m not mentioning their name, linking to their web site, nor using terminology that could uniquely identify them. First I don’t want anyone thinking I’m trying to score “affiliate” brownie points with them by sending referrals, but second I don’t want them to sue me or cancel my account — I like getting ten bucks worth of free gas every few months even though that amounts to three gallons or less now).

The way the “token” system works out in the real world is that, effectively, each “token” is worth about $0.006 — quite literally, six tenths of a cent per token earned. With each sponsored advertisement that lands in your mailbox, and whose “yes, I’ve read the damned thing” link you click, being worth five of those tokens, they’re essentially paying you 3.3 cents per spam. With thousands of spams in my spam folder paying me nothing, that’s actually pretty damned good. Still, there’s something weird going on behind the scenes that just makes me chuckle.

I understand that, in aggregate, they’re probably protecting hundreds, or possibly even thousands of dollars on behalf of nervous advertisers that aren’t convinced that this “pay them a penny or two to listen to us for a second” model will actually work. But in practice, the way it really works makes the whole thing look so ridiculously stupid, you wonder who the hell came up with this in the first place.

I should add another detail here before I continue — they obviously don’t just want you to read the mail, delete it, and move on. Hell, I never read the damned things at all; I just know what to look for, nail it with my middle mouse button (which opens up a new tab in the background for me in my browser), wait for that background tab to finish loading, and close it without ever even seeing the landing page they wanted me to see. I’ve complied with their requirements — I received the mail, didn’t blacklist it or report then as spammers, and I even found (and clicked) the “yup, I received this sucker!” link they supplied, proving I got it.

I’m one of their worst “users,” and there are countless thousands more just like me.

What they want you to do is actually participate in the “fantastic offers” those links take you to. Sure, you get five tokens for clicking the link, but you might get fifty for taking the survey that follows, or a hundred for spending $50 or more at the destination merchant, or sometimes tens of thousands of tokens for buying a fucking house through a mortgage broker advertising with the site (I am not joking about that) — a whopping $130 (or 0.065%) or so “discount” on your $200,000+ purchase.

When you do take part in something that goes beyond just acknowledging receipt of the mail, those extra tokens don’t just magically float into your account for immediate consumption, oh no. You see, even the “free surveys” that pay a mere $0.33 each (50 tokens) take their sweet time to “validate” your submission. They wouldn’t want to have people scamming the system for thirty three fucking cents per shot. When you finish a survey, or jump through whatever hoops they put before you, those tokens get credited to your account, but they’re listed as “pending” instead of “available.”

Tokens can stay “pending” for months, and on occasion, they never come out of it (they get slurped back up into the marketing machine). They (rightly) figure you’re not going to actually begrudge even a dollar or two in tokens, so if those pendings just never get approved, tough shit.

It just makes me wonder why it’s worth it to them to be so protective of such tiny amounts of fake money. As I write this, about 80 tokens in my account are “pending,” which means they’re holding hostage a whopping $0.5328 of my hardly-earned money. They’ll supposedly get freed up sometime in January (which I don’t have any problem believing — in this world of instant global communications and lightning-fast financial transactions, it somehow takes nearly two months for some dumbass marketing firm to acknowledge that I really did tell their computers I don’t drink alcohol).

If they were about to be asked to pony up a couple hundred bucks because I’ve just closed on a house through their mortgage broker, then sure, I could see them wanting to have a copy of the closing papers, or at least a quickie statement from the title company saying “yeah, this asshole came in, and signed a hundred pages of crap after grilling us for two hours about what was on each damned page,” but over fifty cents?

Advertising is a funny, fickle thing, isn’t it? When they want your money, they can’t get enough of it, and they can’t get it fast enough. When you think they owe you, though, it doesn’t matter if it’s a fucking penny or it’s a million dollars — they’re going to pull tightly on those purse strings for as long as they can.

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