How to Get Paid to Surf the Internet

This is the story of how Swagbucks made searching the internet rewarding and fun and how you can turn a simple task like searching the web into a profitable activity.

Internet searches are a multi billion dollar industry. Companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft make billions of dollars every year off of ad revenue on their search site. Now a company call Protégé is trying to hone in on the action by creating a search engine site that gives users rewards for searching on their site. That search engine site is called Swagbucks.

Created in February of 2008 Swagbucks works just like any other search site. In fact its results are even powered by a Google and Ask.com search engine. The only difference is that every time you search on Swagbucks you get a chance to win points that can be redeemed for prizes. These points are known as Swagbucks.

The idea is to reward users of the search site with prizes. In essence, Swagbucks is sharing a piece of the ad revenue with the people who are being advertised to.

Popular reward prizes onSwagbucks include the $5 Amazon gift card, the $20 restaurant.com gift cards, i-Tunes MP3 downloads, baseball cards, comics, books, posters and t-shirts.

Protégé has also partnered up with various musicians, sports teams and celebrities to offer them special individually branded search sites. These sites reward fans who use the sites with special prizes. For example theNew York Giants search site gives away special exclusive Giants prizes (like team jerseys and autographs) while musician with fans bases as diverse as Kanye West and Ted Nugent have sites where their fans can win music, posters and autographs as well. In all Swagbucks has over 200 branded sites catering to everything from country music to rap, the NFL to paintball.

Swagbucks also offers a shop and earn feature (where you can win Swagbucks by shopping on their site) and goes out of their way to be environmentally friendly and help good causes.

Swagbucks has a trade in recycle program that encourages it's users to trade in their old cell phones for Swagbucks. In addition, they recently added a Plant a Tree option as a prize on their site. The Plant a Tree prize allows users to trade in their points to plant a tree in one of 7 reforestation projects around the world.

Some celebrity branded sites get into the action of giving as well by donating the royalties from the site to good causes. Miranda Lambert donates the revenue she gets from her search site to animal charities while the band Linkin Park created a search site for their hurricane relief charity Music for Relief.

In all Swagbucks has grown and become a successful destination for many on the web because they made searching the web both rewarding and fun.