by Mary Clark

Created on: December 17, 2008   Last Updated: September 14, 2010

Paid to Click, noted more popularly as PTC, has become a niche industry for millions of Internet users with the desire to earn a living from home. Paid to Click sites are free to join and do not require any special skills to earn. However, as with anything free there are caveats.

Free members earn at a much lower level than those who pay to upgrade their accounts. That is why the idea of an upgrade is so appealing to the ones who desire the opportunity to earn a living online.

The cost to upgrade varies although the average seems to be around sixty dollars a year. Most, if not all, of the PTC sites also encourage members to buy a referral package to increase their earning potential. The average price for a referral is a dollar. Packages ranging from twenty five to one hundred referrals are made available to PTC members who want to earn more money. A complete upgrade would require an investment of One hundred and sixty dollars. To recoup that investment would require the member to view 16,000 websites! Most users join more than one site and pay to upgrade on each of them, so these numbers will explode exponentially.

Members of paid to click sites are hard working and invest a lot of time in their business. I use the term business here because that is exactly how these members feel about their online activities. They will upgrade their membership as soon as they join a new site to receive the higher pay level and they will buy referrals in varying increments to grow their business.

The PTC sites they join usually have between five and fifteen ads per day for them to visit. Each ad must be viewed for a minimum of thirty seconds to qualify as a paid earning. If a technical problem or glitch with the site's functionality is encountered the visit will not be credited causing them to incur a loss to their business for that day. They advertise their business to promote its growth. They are trying to operate a home based business. Unfortunately the business model they have selected is not one that yields a reliable or ongoing income. They may receive a few sporadic payments from a small handful of sites, if they can earn enough to reach the payout minimum before a particular site shuts down.

The avid clicker is a diligent worker but in order to earn minimum wage pay, they would need to participate on sixty paid to click websites. There is no shortage of these types of sites and I am sure that if someone truly wanted to make this their main source of income, they could locate enough sites. For many, the sites they join go under and when a site goes offline, it takes the money these individual have earned with them.

Learn more about this author, Mary Clark.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.