Geek On The Mountain

There is a website giving away ipods for free. All you have to do is sign up with one of their sponsors and get some friends to do the same. Sound devious? It did to me at first as well. In fact, I probably heard about this a month ago or more, but I ignored it until just the other day. It seems to be legit. The thing that really won me over was a bit of investigative reporting done by wired last week. I have indeed seen people who have actually gotten an ipod out of the deal, and if a major news agency is willing to say the same, then I think it’s at least worth a shot. They have the new 4th gen 20 gig ipod, all of the mini’s, and for those who already have one and don’t seem to think they need another, there’s a $250 gift cert to itunes.

I’ll admit, I wouldn’t be willing to put any money into it. But then again, that’s not needed. The actual company isn’t asking anything more from you than an email address and a mailing address to ship the ipod to. Any money you actually end up spending goes to their sponsors, not to them (at least not directly, the sponsors reimburse this place for the referral…they’re a marketing company). No one really knows how much they make off each referral, and although it’s probably a descent amount, I’m sure it’s nowhere near the $50+ they would need to cover their costs if they shipped an ipod to every user. But they know that not everyone will make it that far. They make money on the people who only end up getting a couple of referrals and don’t go any further.

I should also make it clear that you don’t even end up having to pay the sponsors any money. From what I’ve seen, most of the offers have a free trial, in which case you can just cancel before you actually shell out any cash, but you still get credit for signing up. Naturally, enough people don’t end up canceling to make it worth everyone’s while to keep doing this. I’ve heard good things about an offer from inphone. Apparently there are no costs at all until you use the service, and you even get a $10 gift cert to amazon for signing up. I wasn’t offered that one. (they’ll offer like 8 or 10 choices to each person, but they have more sponsors than that). Since there’s no real cost, and just a little bit of time involved, I figured I’d go ahead and give it a shot. I’ve had my eye on the new 4th generation 20 gig ipods.

In addition to completing one offer, you need refer 5 friends to do the same. They have to use your link in order to show up as being referred by you, and then they must complete an offer. That said, here’s my link http://www.freeiPods.com/default.aspx?referer=8325440

I’ve heard that macs may have trouble with the site working properly, but surely use no other browser than IE. Firefox doesn’t really display the site correctly, but more importantly, there are reports that something else is broken that you may not get credit for signing up. Therefore, go with IE. Play it safe. It’s also fair to mention that you can expect spam coming out of this (although it technically isn’t spam since I’m sure you agreed to receive email offers from them and their marketing partners when you signed up). I personally created a new address just for the site to avoid extra emails, and I’m glad I did since I got 3 last night alone. Also, there have reportedly been problems with hotmail not working (emails from freeipods may not reach hotmail accounts, whether it’s hotmail’s doing or freeipods I don’t know).

I should also comment that although this sounds like a pyramid scheme, it isn’t. In a pyramid scheme, I pay some amount of money and then sign up friends to do the same, in which case some of their money comes back to me and so on and so forth down the line. That’s not happening here. There’s no money changing hands. This is essentially just like clicking on banners and getting paid. They’re a marketing firm that’s getting paid to refer people to various services that that can usually be canceled or not used before actually spending any money. Like I said, I figure it’s worth a shot. Please check out the Wired article and help me out by following my link to the site and signing up.

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