I have been an IWON user for some time, many years actually. I am a sucker for a sweepstakes, giveaways, and freebies. When IWON started their website they had a pretty decent homepage, free e-mail, and you could get entries into their sweepstakes for doing normal web activity. I was hooked. But then so were a lot of other people. I never won a thing but there was always the possibility, so I kept trying.
I was stuck with dial up for the longest time which didn’t help matters any. Let’s face it, slow is slow. I have since upgraded to DSL which is much better, but I suspect that there are still even faster ways to go.
Anyway, IWON has just changed there whole program. They have more games and more ways to earn entries (called coins) and that is supposed to help you have more chances to win. In the old program you could earn up to 100 entries per day and those entries were put into all sweepstakes. Now you have to earn 100 coins to make one entry and you have to decide which sweepstakes you are going to put it towards because it does not go into all sweeps.
Well, on the home page there are a couple of standard games you can play with which to earn these coins. One is a big prize wheel and the other a sort of slot machine. Today it finally happened. I spun the slot machine the full amount of times and ended up with absolutely nothing. The big prize wheel only gave up 500 coins, enough for a mere 5 entries. That won’t change your odds of winning anything by much.
5 entries in to be divided among the 7 sweepstakes, compared to the 100 entries in all sweepstakes for the day and you can see that we are not playing the same game. Of course you can earn and extra 30 coins per search, and you can earn more coins for playing some of the other games available, and some of those other games are kind of addicting. They have variations on casino games, some sports games, but also they have some pretty fun word games, and number games like Sudoku. By playing these extra games you can build up some extra entries but you can sure loose a lot of time. Oh, and did I mention that the whole time you are playing they are flashing advertisements at you. You have to pay for those prizes somehow.
I suppose I can’t complain too much, though in all the years of playing and using IWON it wasn’t until last December that I finally won something. I ended up hitting the IWON search sweepstakes for some $10 gift certificates to Amazon.com. That is like having a lousy game of golf but then hitting a really good tee shot on the last hole. You know you have to come back for more.
I know I will be back for more. After all the some of the games are kinda fun and challenging, even if the most seen phrases are ‘Sorry’ and ‘Try Again’. Also I am not the only one that thinks so for as I type this I see that there are 125,976 people logged on at the moment.
My biggest complaint for them or any web site is the fact that they can and do generate spam mail through their advertisers. Of course, anyone that has an e-mail account and has told at least one other person the address to that account will have received some spam. I have lost the use of more than one e-mail account to spam. I have even gotten spam from my own account address as someone was spoofing my address to send out spam. That is the worst kind of uncool. If ever there should be a target for malicious computing, spam frauders should be at the top of the list.
The other thing that pushes my buttons about IWON is the use of pop ups and pop unders. They do it to excess and it drives me nuts. I was using an old computer with an old browser and it was so bad that it drove me to action. I just downloaded the latest version of Mozilla Firefox, a way cool browser. It seems like it is compatible with everything. It uses less resources too so it should perform better than that other browser. I am going to try it for awhile and see if there are any problems. At least I have something now to block those pesky pop ups.
This is Ed Nef with a view from the Farr West.
I have added some tip pages for those that are spending time on IWON. Check it out, you might find something new. IWON TIPS Page 1.
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