Are Prize Give-Away Websites A Scam?

We have all seen the plethora of 'Free iPod' and 'Win A Free Dream Holiday' offers frequenting our browsers and inboxes either directly or through Competitions, Freebies or Free Stuff websites, but are they legitimate, do these companies actually give any prizes away, and why do they do it?

Well, I should start by saying that, like most online channels, there are the good, the bad, and the downright ugly. However, the prize give-away model is a viable one for internet marketing companies to gather segmented data from its visitors and either monetize this data through the immediate cross-selling of other partners offers (via hosted forms or co-registration) or through implementing ongoing email campaigns in an attempt to derive revenue from the dataset over the lifetime of the data remaining valid.

It follows that many of the larger direct marketing agencies have derived great success from this model, and continue to thrive as email service providers develop continuously improved tool sets including advanced reporting, split-testing, and segmentation technologies.

Do they actually give the prizes away? Well, the volume of sign-ups that these kind of 'freebie give-away' websites can generate means that the price of the 'freebie' is so low in relative terms that it would be a very poor strategy not to. Good reputations are easily lost, and the rewards of the positive public relations that prize give-aways generate make it worthwhile for the competitions to be run legitimately, and in our experience, this has generally been the case

So, in summary, this continues to be a lucrative business for the competition operators, and although spam filters continue to do their best, prize give-away websites are here to stay.

Webtistic LTD are a UK internet marketing company.