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How eBay is ruining itself

Dave Farquhar net.culture , , , , , , , ,

A thread on one of the train forums I frequent mentioned today that the number of listings for Marx trains on eBay is down about 50% over what it was a year or so ago. Not only that, the listings are by and large the common, less interesting stuff.

Meanwhile, a debate rages on another forum I read sometimes, frequented by eBay sellers. On one side are the eBay apologists, saying they’ll just change as eBay changes. On the other side, people struggling to make a profit in the ever-changing environment are finding other venues to sell their wares and finding themselves a lot happier.The problem is that eBay is trying to create a sterile, retail experience. The big shareholders and the executives seem to think that’s what the consumer wants.

Another seller’s theory is that the people who sell brand new merchandise in huge quantities are less troublesome, causing fewer headaches for eBay and for the customers.

The eBay business books I’ve read talk a lot about people who drop-ship pool tables and other merchandise in large quantities, never touching any of it, and supposedly becoming millionaires by doing it.

But the people who put eBay on the map are the people like the ones I see every Saturday morning. They study classified ads the way a devout monk would study Scripture, looking for clues and carefully plotting out their routes. They get up before dawn and drive to their carefully chosen site. Their prey: The estate sale. They line up in the driveway hours before the sale opens, like bargain hunters the day after Thanksgiving. When the sale finally opens, shoppers come in, 10, 20, or 50 at a time, depending on the size of the house, while those who arrived later wait their turn. Any time someone leaves, those in the driveway gawk, trying to see what he or she purchased.

It doesn’t matter what item you can name, I know someone who goes out every Saturday looking for it. Some of these people are collectors, but some of them hawk their finds on eBay. They buy on Saturday and Sunday, then they spend hours the following week figuring out what exactly they have, carefully photographing and describing each item, then listing it, hoping to attract bidders.

The typical eBay addict doesn’t go there to buy a pool table, or the kind of things they sell at a suburban mall. Certainly there are people who buy those sorts of things on eBay. But those tend to be occasional shoppers. The biggest eBay addicts are the fanatics–the serious collectors who spend hours every day scouring new eBay listings, looking for items they don’t have in their collections.

And guess what? These collectors don’t buy from drop-shippers who duplicate the retail experience. The drop-shippers can’t get those kinds of collectibles. It’s the people who get up at 5 a.m. each Saturday to be first in line to prowl around in someone’s attic or basement who get that stuff.

The problem is that the people who do get that stuff have a difficult time becoming (and remaining) Powersellers. A Powerseller has to sell 100 items or $1,000 worth of inventory per month. If I wanted to sell vintage trains on eBay, there’s no way I could locate 1,200 items each year. Not in St. Louis. The $1,000 mark wouldn’t be much easier to hit.

So eBay is driving away that kind of seller. And as a result, eBay is going to lose that type of buyer as well.

I know for a fact there are plenty of collectors in Europe and elsewhere who are eager to take advantage of the low value of the dollar and buy a bunch of collectible American trains at bargain prices due to the exchange rate. Unfortunately the timing is horrible. The new eBay policies have driven away a lot of the people who sell the best items. So the foreigners with money to spend end up spending a lot less than they would like. Sure, they’ll buy the $10 items that are listed, but they’d really rather buy the $100 and $1,000 items that were listed last year but are conspicuously absent today.

Ten years ago, eBay was flying high. They weren’t the first online auction, but they were the most successful, precisely because they allowed ordinary people to sell ordinary (and extraordinary) things. I bought a number of things from online auctions in the mid 1990s, including the Lexmark 4039 laser printer I still use every day. I don’t remember now the name of the auction house where I bought it. I do know it went out of business shortly after eBay became widely known.

Lots of other companies wanted in on the action. Amazon, Yahoo, and others launched auction sites that looked and acted a lot like eBay. But they never went anywhere. The best sellers put their best stuff on eBay. The wannabes tended to just have second-rate stuff sold by second-rate sellers. Case point: I once tried to buy a lot of vintage train magazines from an Amazon auction. I won, paid my money, and waited. And waited. A week later I e-mailed the seller. No response. Finally after another week he responded, saying he’d been having computer trouble and asking if I still wanted the magazines. Well, since he offered me the refund, I took it. I spent the money on eBay instead.

Yahoo auctions are gone, closed about a year ago. If Amazon’s auctions are still open, they’re sure doing a good job of hiding them.

If another company wants to get a piece of eBay’s business, the time is right. There are lots of refugee eBay sellers looking for someplace a little cheaper, with a little more stable set of rules where they can sell. And if a large enough group of them take up shop somewhere, there are plenty of buyers more than willing to follow them there.

It may not happen this year. But I do think it’s only a matter of time.

What net neutrality means and why it\’s a good thing

Dave Farquhar net.culture , , , , , , , ,

This week, John C. Dvorak makes a good argument in favor of net neutrality.

I’m going to take it from a different angle. I am a conservative. While I rarely vote a straight Republican ticket, I am registered as a Republican. Republicans generally are against net neutrality.

They are wrong. I will assume it’s from a lack of understanding rather than bad intentions, but in this case, wrong is wrong. I’ll explain why. Read more

Net neutrality has little to do with censorship but it\’s a good idea anyway

Dave Farquhar net.culture , , , , ,

Pearl Jam came out in favor of net neutrality after AT&T censored a broadcast a performance they did in Chicago last Sunday. I guess AT&T didn’t like Pearl Jam’s anti-Bush message.

I don’t know if Pearl Jam’s sudden embrace of net neutrality is out of ignorance, or if it’s retaliation. It doesn’t really matter because it should help bring some more awareness to the issue.Here’s the issue with net neutrality, in a nutshell. AT&T wants to charge companies like Amazon, eBay, and Google when people like you and me access their web pages. And if the companies don’t pay, AT&T will make the web sites slower. The idea is that if one company doesn’t pay the fees but a competitor does, AT&T customers will probably opt to use the faster services.

Proponents say AT&T built the infrastructure, so they have the right to charge whoever uses it.

There are two problems with that logic.

They’re already paying to use it.

When a company decides to go online, they buy an Internet connection. That connection might be owned by AT&T, or it might be owned by some other provider. It isn’t cheap. While a 1.5-megabit cable modem connection might cost a consumer $30, a commercial-grade 1.5-megabit T1 connection will cost more on the order of $500 a month. A company like Google needs a lot more than one of these connections. Google most likely is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, every month for the privilege of being on the Internet.

Without content, an Internet connection has no value.

AT&T knows nothing about how online services work, because they haven’t been in the business long. Twenty years ago, if you wanted to go online, you didn’t use the Internet unless you were a college student. You subscribed to a service like AOL or Compuserve or Prodigy, who sent you a disk and a local phone number that you called with your modem, and then when you wanted to go online, you connected to their service. It had e-mail and forums and downloads and news, kind of like the Internet does today, but it was smaller. You could interact with other subscribers but that was pretty much it. E-mail was limited, for the most part, to other members of the same service.

Compuserve was the biggest and most expensive service, but it survived because it had the most features. AOL and Prodigy survived because they were easy to use. GEnie, a competing service operated by General Electric, survived primarily because it was cheaper than the others. Each had a niche. In these cases, the company providing access also provided the content. It was a closed system.

The Internet is an open system. AT&T isn’t providing all of the content. AT&T is my Internet provider, and I never touch any of their content, except when my credit card expires and I get a new one and I have to go to att.com to update my account with the new expiration date for my automatic bill-pay.

If it weren’t for the companies like eBay and Amazon and Google, nobody would want an Internet connection in the first place, because without those providers, an Internet connection is pretty much useless. The only reason the Internet took off in the first place was because companies like AOL and CompuServe couldn’t offer services that were as good as what Google and Amazon and eBay.

That’s why AOL went from a blue-chip stock to a drag on Time-Warner’s share price in less than a decade.

People buy Internet connections so they can use Google and Amazon and eBay. Very few people care about the mostly sterile content AT&T puts on the Internet. I’m sure some people enjoy watching concerts in the AT&T blue room, but I’ve never heard of anyone watching anything there. But I hear every day about what someone bought or sold on eBay, or a story that showed up on Google News or CNN.com, or a book someone bought on Amazon.

And when they use e-mail, people increasingly are using e-mail from Google or Yahoo or Microsoft instead of the one from their Internet provider. That way they can read their mail anywhere, and they can keep their e-mail address even if they move or change Internet providers. So Internet providers aren’t even the primary source of the most basic services anymore.

If anything, AT&T should be paying the companies that produce the content. Not the other way around.

AT&T isn’t selling content. It’s selling a pipe that content travels to. Lest AT&T get a big head, all AT&T has to offer is plumbing.

So what does this have to do with censorship?

Net neutrality has very little to do with censorship. I suppose someone with contrarian views operating a blog on a shoestring who can’t afford to pay for both an Internet connection and the privilege of running in AT&T’s fast lane is a victim of a form of censorship. Or if Google doesn’t pay to be in the fast lane but Yahoo does, then in a way Google is being censored in favor of Yahoo.

But if AT&T chooses to drop the audio out of a Pearl Jam concert, net neutrality isn’t going to stop that. In that case, AT&T is the provider, not just the company providing the plumbing.

But net neutrality is a good thing because without it, what’s going to happen is higher prices for the things you buy on Amazon and eBay, and less content on news sites because the news providers can’t afford as many writers because now they’re having to pay AT&T and every other company that sells digital plumbing. You get less, so that Randall Stephenson gets a higher salary and a more attractive stock options.

Stephenson made $14.6 million last year, before he got promoted to CEO.

I don’t think you and I need to make any more sacrifices in order to give this fat cat a bigger raise.

Replace your Antivirus software with this freebie and regain your performance

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , ,

Antivirus software is the worst culprit in PC slowdowns. I am not alone in this belief. I don’t suggest going without (not completely) but it’s certainly possible to save lots of money, eliminate subscriptions, eliminate most of the overhead, and still practice (relatively) safe computing while running Windows.

Use Clamwin, the Windows version of ClamAV, and don’t engage in risky behavior (more on that later).Clamwin is free, GPL software, meaning you never have to pay for or renew it. It lacks a realtime scanner, which is the main resource hog for PCs. This may leave you vulnerable to infections, but think about where the majority of infections come from: E-mail, downloads, and drive-by installations. Clamwin comes with hooks into Outlook to scan e-mail attachments for you, and Clamglue is a plugin for Firefox that automatically scans all downloaded files. Of course you’re using Firefox, right? Using a non-Internet Explorer browser is the most effective way to prevent drive-by installations. I don’t use IE on my personal PCs for anything other than running Windows update.

Realtime protection made lots of sense when the main distribution point for viruses was infected floppies, but those days are long gone. This approach protects you against modern viruses without making your multi-gigahertz computer run like a Pentium-75.

I do suggest periodically scanning your system, something that even antivirus packages with realtime protection do. It makes you wonder how much confidence they have in that resource-hogging realtime protection, doesn’t it? Weekly scans are usually adequate; daily scans are better if you suspect some users of your computer engage in risky behavior.

Risky computer behavior

The last virus that ever hit any computer I was using was LoveLetter, which was way back in May 2000. The only reason I got that one was because I had a client who got infected and she just happened to have me in her address book. I don’t know the last time I got a virus before that.

It’s not because I’m lucky, it’s because I’m careful. There are lots of things I don’t do with my computers.

I stay off filesharing networks. Not everything on your favorite MP3-sharing site is what it claims to be, and there are people who believe that if you’re downloading music without paying them for it, they are entirely justified in doing anything they want to you, such as infecting you with a computer virus.

I don’t open e-mail attachments from strangers, or unexpected e-mail attachments from people I know. For that matter, if I don’t recognize the sender of an e-mail message, I probably won’t open it at all, attachment or no attachment.

I don’t run Internet Explorer if I can possibly avoid it. Internet Explorer’s tight integration into the operating system makes it far too easy for people to run software on your computer if you so much as visit a web page. Google tries to identify web pages that might be trying to do this, but a safer option is to use a different web browser that doesn’t understand ActiveX and doesn’t have ties into your underlying operating system.

I don’t install a lot of software downloaded from the Internet. A good rule is not to install any “free” software whatsoever unless it’s licensed under the GNU GPL or another similar open-source license. If you don’t know what that means, learn. Open source means the computer code behind the program is freely available and outside programmers can examine it. If a program distributed that way does anything malicious, someone’s going to figure it out really fast. If I’m going to download and install something that isn’t open source, I only do so when somebody I trust (be it a trusted colleague, a magazine columnist, etc.) recommends it.

I don’t rely on software firewalls. I have a separate cable/DSL router that acts as a firewall and sits between my computers and the Internet. So when the random virus comes around looking for a computer to infect, my firewall doesn’t even speak their language (it doesn’t run Windows and doesn’t have an Intel or AMD processor inside), so the potential infection just bounces right off.

Use a web-based e-mail service instead of a program like Outlook or Outlook Express if you can. If you use something like Yahoo Mail or Hotmail, that company’s servers scan your incoming and outgoing e-mail for viruses, so if someone sends a virus to your Yahoo account, you won’t get it. Does your ISP scan your e-mail for you? If you don’t know, you probably should consider getting your e-mail from someone else. Your antivirus should catch it, of course, but it never hurts to have someone else looking out for you too.

If you avoid these practices, you can join me in throwing out your commercial, for-pay antivirus software and reclaim a lot of computer performance too.

Well, that solves one mystery of the universe

Dave Farquhar net.culture

I’m not sure when I first heard of Craigslist. I think it was sometime this year. It’s probably the biggest up-and-coming website there is, and while it’s a way of life for some (people have used it to sell everything they own, including their house, then move to a new city, find a new place to live, a new job, and new stuff to fill it) a large number of people have never seen or heard of it.

What I’ve always wondered is how what amounts to a free classified ad board makes money.It turns out it makes its money from the job postings. Prospective employers have to pay for their ads. The rest of us get to freeload. And I do; I’ve sold stuff there, and I’ve bought stuff there. I’ve placed wanted ads, and I’ve bought stuff there that I knew I could resell for a profit elsewhere.

A lot of people don’t like the site because it’s basically all text with virtually no graphic design. Other people like it for just that reason. Personally, its minimalist design doesn’t bother me at all. It’s a free ad service, it’s easy enough for me to find stuff on it, and enough people use it to make it worthwhile to look there and post there. What more could you want?

Supposedly, the up-and-coming Google Base is going to take aim at Craigslist. Others think it’s an Ebay killer. We’ll see. Based on the few vague descriptions that are out there, it’s not clear to me exactly what it’s intended to do yet.

Personally, I’d rather see Ebay get some real competition. Amazon and Yahoo have launched auction sites, but no one comes. People list at those venues basically as an afterthought. I’ve picked up some bargains both places, but it’s rare enough that anything I’m interested in turns up there that it’s been months since I’ve looked either place.

Ebay is big and successful and you can find almost anything there, but it’s almost too big and too successful. Its fees are high, and if you use Paypal, you essentially pay the fees twice. What we’re seeing is the classic monopoly problem: The company is so dominant, the only way for it to gain revenue is by raising its fees, so it raises its fees every year. The people who make their living on the service protest, but there isn’t much they can do about it; packing up and going elsewhere won’t work because there’s nowhere else to go. So they work harder.

Competition would be good for everyone. It would force Ebay to lower its fees and find other ways to improve its experience, and maybe the competing product will be better too. Imagine what the auto industry would be like if GM didn’t have Ford and Toyota around to keep it honest.

What about Craigslist? Well, if it goes by the wayside, it was fun while it lasted. But I suspect it, too, will adapt.

Another take on Google’s digital library

Dave Farquhar Copyright , , , , ,

CNN has an interesting analysis of Google’s attempts to digitize millions of books.

I still argue this project can only be a good thing.The article quotes Tim O’Reilly, and while anyone who knows me knows O’Reilly and I don’t see eye to eye on a lot of things, he’s right when he says the biggest problem an author faces, by far, is obscurity.

I have a real-world example that I’ve seen firsthand. About 18 months ago, I was introduced to a pair of obscure books written by master modeler Wayne Wesolowski. Today, Wesolowski is best known for hand-building a huge model of Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train, but an earlier generation knew him as someone who published articles in magazines like Model Railroader and Railroad Model Craftsman on an almost monthly basis.

In the early 1980s, Wesolowski wrote a couple of books. Both were printed twice under different titles, but one dealt with building model railroad cars from scratch and the other dealt with buildings. At the time I was introduced to them, the books were believed to be rare, and it was impossible to find a copy of either of them for any less than $125.

Today, it’s still possible to buy used copies of the books for $125, but if you shop around, you can get them for a lot less. I found a copy of Wesolowski’s ABCs of Building Model Railroad Cars for less than $12 earlier this month. It sold before I could click on the link, but I found another copy for $18. I snapped it up immediately.

Wesolowski’s books may not always be possible to find for less than $30, but it’s pretty easy to find them at or around that price with just a little bit of patience. I believe what’s happening is that people who otherwise would have never known the book existed started looking for it, which in turn caused used booksellers to look for it. In the meantime, the sale of used books online has drummed up a lot of press, including in the New York Times, causing still more copies of the book to come off dusty shelves and into circulation, driving down prices and possibly driving up sales.

If snippets of text from this book were searchable online, as opposed to vague mentions on an obscure Yahoo discussion group, who knows what would happen to these books’ sales? Maybe it still wouldn’t be enough critical mass to ramp up publication again, but it’s possible. At the very least, it’d be a bonanza for used booksellers, whether it’s people who do it for a living or people who are thinning out their personal book collections.

In turn, that extra commerce can only help the economy.

Why small business is better than big business

Dave Farquhar Society , , ,

Technophilosopher Paul Graham (whose essay on Bayesian filtering spurred the development of one of the more popular methods for blocking spam) has some thoughts on what companies ought to learn from open source and blogging.

I really liked this quote: [Those who] run Windows on servers ought to be prepared to explain what they know about servers that Google and Yahoo don’t know. I know Google and Yahoo are a whole lot smarter than anyone I’ve worked for who runs on Windows.

But the most poignant bit for me was this: People work a lot harder on things they like.

I believe this is why successful small businesses are successful. Millionaire owners of small businesses often work very long hours–possibly 10 or even 14 hours a day. But many of them probably don’t realize they’re working those long hours because they enjoy it.

I’ve noticed this with my wife when I work with her. She doesn’t keep track of the hours she works because she doesn’t care. And at the end of my workday when I come home, we might spend most of the evening working, but at the end of the evening, we’re no more tired than we would have been if we’d spent the evening sitting on the couch watching TV.

As I watch the rise and fall of companies in the computer industry, I see this same pattern. Why can’t Microsoft sustain the growth of its early years? There are lots of reasons, but in the very early days when Bill Gates and Paul Allen actually spent time writing code alongside their employees, everyone worked excruciatingly long hours, but they did it out of choice. Microsoft is notorious for trying to force those kinds of hours out of its workers today (the book Microserfs details this in general). Could the reason every Microsoft operating system released in the last 15 years has been delayed be because they’re just a labor, rather than a labor of love?

I think that has a lot to do with it.

And I think this is the reason why I’m not a fan of big business and never have been. Don’t get me wrong; I’m no fan of big government or big labor either. Big anything is out of touch and can’t help but focus more on self-preservation than on the things it’s doing and why those things are interesting and important. I can’t necessarily tell you why any given thing is interesting or important but I can tell you without even seeing it that it isn’t because of the amount of money it can make.

Whatever happened to… online politeness?

Dave Farquhar net.culture , , , ,

Very early in my BBSing days (1989 or so), I was talking to the operator of one of the first BBSs I called. He said he instantly bans anyone who engages in "flame wars."

I didn’t know what a flame war was, though I found out pretty fast. And they’re just as much a problem today as they were back then. Maybe more, since people can talk any time and they don’t have to wait for the BBS line to get un-busy.Gatermann and I were talking about how rude people can be online. It’s frustrating to me–probably the most frustrating thing about the ‘net. But that human contact is the best thing about the ‘net, so of course I always come back, no matter how torqued off I get.

But I think that’s the problem: Human contact. The computer dehumanizes it.

I first noticed myself dehumanizing when I was meeting girls on eharmony.com two summers ago. The girls outnumber the guys there, so if you’re a guy, unless you’ve really narrowed your focus, you’re going to get a lot of matches. It felt kind of like playing Alter Ego or another early game that tried to simulate human contact. I’d say something and try to see what they sent back. And it was at the point that I got to see one girl’s picture that it suddenly dawned on me that there was a human being sitting on the other side of that keyboard and monitor.

I don’t think some people grasp the concept of talking through a machine versus talking to a machine.

Of course, some people may just hide behind it. They can’t see the look of hurt on the other person’s face, and the other person can’t reach across the table and smack them when they have it coming, so they act like trolls and get away with it. Maybe they even relish it.

The most blatant example I’ve seen is a guy who swoops in on most of the train boards once a month or so. He’s a millionaire in Washington, D.C. (he’s a trash-hauling magnate, from what I understand), and supposedly has a train collection and layout that must be seen to believe. I’m told that in person he’s a great guy, and supposedly just about anyone can come into his house and see his layout just by asking.

But online, he’s a monster. He swoops in, says rude things, watches the volcano erupt as the people who disagree with him start screaming, and then the people who agree with him start screaming, and mostly just sits back and enjoys watching people bicker and throw temper tantrums.

That’s my worst experience, mostly because I stay out of chat rooms, except for a Yahoo chat room that meets on Saturday nights and talks about repairing Marx trains. The start of the whole conversation was Gatermann telling me about someone he knows signing onto a chat room. She got to talking to some guy she didn’t know from Adam, and almost immediately demanded to see pictures. And I’m not talking the kind of pictures you show to your mother.

Maybe some people enjoy being Dr. Jeckyl in person and Mr. Hyde as soon as they sign on to the Internet. Maybe some just can’t get the idea in their head that they’re talking to a human being, since they’re not hearing a human voice and they’re not seeing facial expressions.

Anymore, I try not to say anything online that I wouldn’t say in person to someone I expect to see again. And the funny thing is, that actually keeps me out of trouble most of the time.

To take care of the rest of the time, there are certain things that I just try to avoid talking about.

Survey sites, revisited

Dave Farquhar Saving money

Back in December, I warned against paying anyone $35 for lists of survey sites.

If I was convinced then it was a bad idea, I’m even more convinced now.The hucksters promise you can make a hundred dollars an hour or more. If you do the math, that can be true–I suppose if someone offers you $35 to take a survey and you finish it in 15 minutes, you’ve essentially been paid $140 an hour–but that’s numbers trickery. You’re not going to get enough surveys to do a 40-hour week at that rate, unless you’re a whole lot luckier than I am.

I signed up at several paid survey sites, starting in late November. Within a week, I got a couple of $10 surveys. After a month or so, a couple of $25, $35 surveys came in. It was nice. Some of the surveys took longer than others, but I don’t think any of them took me much more than 30 minutes.

I think I may have made $100 in my best month.

But here’s the rub. The marketing research people who do these sites don’t want career survey takers. If you take a survey about, say, potato chips, they don’t want to hear from you again for another six months.

My best month, I made about $100. These days, I’m making more like $5 a week. I’m not complaining, because it’s usually a fairly easy five bucks, and while that’s a small amount of money, it’s about the smallest amount of money that you can actually do something with. But is it worth paying $35 to get at a list of people who are willing to shoot five bucks your way every once in a while? No.

The other thing that works against paid surveys being the secret of the universe that leads to financial independence is the speed. Some of them pay you within a couple of weeks. Some of them take months. If your rent is due next week and you’re a few bucks short, don’t count on filling out a bunch of surveys to make up the difference–you’ll be lucky if the money gets to you in time to help you with next month’s rent.

So don’t pay that survey site. If you’re curious, click that link above to the entry I wrote back in December. In the comments, there’s a link to a good site with links to literally hundreds of survey sites, both paid and unpaid. Sign up for a Yahoo mail account and use it to register for a few sites and see what happens. Maybe you’ll do better than me and make a couple hundred bucks one month. Maybe you’ll just make $15. But at least you didn’t pay $35 to find out.

Why do people pay $35 for lists of paid survey sites?

Dave Farquhar Saving money , , ,

I’ve been seeing more and more advertisements for paid survey sites. And the promises keep getting more and more ridiculous.

I think it’s a scam. You can make a little bit of spending money filling out surveys, but don’t let anyone hoodwink you into thinking you’ll get rich. Look at it as a way to spend a couple of hours a week to make a little bit of extra money, and nothing more, and you stand to do OK.First of all, don’t pay your $35. The people who run those sites say you can make that money back immediately. The problem is, they don’t know that. So why should you part with $35 without knowing when you’ll recoup your investment?

I filled out my first paid survey in 1996 or 1997. The first survey I filled out must have been some early marketing research for Webvan, because I distinctly remember it asking me questions about online grocery shopping. I asnwered their questions, and a few weeks later a check for $12 appeared in my mailbox. Occasionally I got e-mail invitations to participate in another survey. I probably made about $50 from that research firm before it disappeared. That happens.

More recently, after seeing an ad for someone wanting my $35, I decided to see what I could find on my own. A Google search on “paid survey” turned up a few leads. I ended up joining a couple. They sent me a few surveys. Some of the surveys meet their quota within minutes of being sent out, so I’ve probably missed half my opportunities.

Here’s my advice on these things. Let people pay you for your opinions, but protect yourself. Get a free e-mail account from Yahoo, since it has decent spam protection, and use it for surveys exclusively. I’ve started getting a lot more spam since I signed up with these guys. I can’t say I’m surprised. I thought I opted out of all the mailings but it’s hard to know you checked all of the important boxes.

Shy away from people who offer you coupons or merchandise. Why should you work for frivolous things you probably don’t want or need? Stick with survey sites that offer cash. One site I signed up for pays in points, redeemable for cash. Problem is, when you convert it to cash, you get five cents per point, and you have to accumulate a minimum of 1,000 points before you can cash out. The last survey I got from them promised to take 30-45 minutes and pay 100 points. Considering I’d have to take 10 surveys before I saw a penny, and the effort was twice as much for half as much pay as some other sites pay, I wish I hadn’t bothered.

A lot of the sites require you to have a bunch of plug-ins installed, like Flash and Real. Most don’t seem to work with anything but Internet Explorer. If you want to do this a lot, it might not be a bad idea to dig the old Pentium-200 out of the closet and use it for your survey activity and only for your survey activity. That way if it gets infected with spyware, it won’t affect your good computer, and you’ll have a better idea where the problem came from.

The claims of making $200 an hour are very misleading. Most surveys that pay $20 take 20-30 minutes to fill out, especially if you answer honestly, which you should. Fill out three surveys and I guess you can say you make $60 an hour. But you’d have to be in an unbelievably desirable demographic to get more than a couple of surveys a day. While some sites promise occasional surveys that pay $100 or more, I have yet to see one. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist, but it suggests they aren’t common.

One site, Surveysavvy.com, allows you to refer friends, and they pay you a small commission based on your referrers’ work, allowing you to set up a two-level pyramid scheme. (Full disclosure: the link above is a referral to me.)

So, don’t expect to be able to quit your day job and get rich filling out online surveys. Don’t expect to be able to quit your job, period. If you’re in a reasonably desirable demographic, you might be able to pull in a thousand dollars or two a year filling out surveys. That could make a nice retirement nest egg, help you pay down some debt, or pay for a vacation.

That pretty much mirrors what an interviewee said in a recent news story I saw about secret shopping. He said he makes enough to go on vacation once a year, but he does have to work a little bit for it. He also said you should never pay anyone to be a secret shopper.

I won’t get rich, but if I end up making enough money to pay my accountant come tax time, I’ll be happy.