mGinger - Make Money With Your Mobile Phone

Launched on April 19, 2007, and still in beta as of April 30, 2007, mGinger brings advertising to the mobile phone platform. They do this by sending SMS advertisements to your mobile phone based on the categories you choose when you sign up and the time period you choose to receive these advertisements in (more about this below).

This is similar to a MLM pyramid scheme, and the annoyance:payoff ratio looks pretty sweet. Registration is free and can be either through direct sign up or through a referral by a friend. If you are referred by a friend, you automatically get added to that friend’s network and your friend earns 10 paise for every advertisement you receive and 5 paise for every advertisement one of your referrals receives. Their website mentions only these two levels, and it is probably safe to assume that the pyramid does not get any bigger than that.

Registration: When you click on ’sign up now’ you face a rather normal-looking registration form split into three blocks. Block 1 is for account information, with fields for your desired username and password. Even though mGinger was only 11 days old when I registered, I was unable to get the ‘gautham’ username, so register now unless you want to end up with yourname_2007 or yourname_kewl or something similar. The second block is personal information, with fields for first name, last name, email address, mobile number, gender, marital status, state, and date of birth. You will need to use a valid email address since a confirmation email is sent to the address supplied, and the mobile number field has a lock icon next to it with a popup tooltip that says “Privacy assured,” whatever that’s supposed to mean. The third block is an easy-to-read CAPTCHA-like image verification field to prevent automated registrations, although that might be overkill seeing how one requires a valid email address AND a working mobile number to get through all stages of the registration process.

Once this first step is completed, all you need to do is wait for the confirmation email and then, once you confirm the email address, key in the 4-digit verification code sent to your mobile number into another form.

Now, we move onto the third step, where you get to choose the maximum number of ads you wish to receive per day (choosing between 3, 5, 7, and 10), and the time slot you wish to receive such advertisements in (a minimum of 2 hours), and whether you want to share your number, email address, or both with the advertiser.

After this, we get to to the interests block, with a minimum of five selected options required. The available options are:

• Apparels and Accessories
• Automobile
• Beauty
• Books, Stationary (I’m sure they mean Stationery) and Magazines
• Career and Education
• Computers and Peripherals
• Electronics
• Events
• Financial Products
• Fitness and Sports
• Gifts, Hobbies, and Collectibles
• Home, Decor, and Furnishings
• Jewellery
• Mobiles, Phones, and Accessories
• Movies, Music, Dining, Masti
• Real Estate and Services
• Travel and Holiday

Each of these categories has subcategories, and there’s a box below that labeled “Other Interests.” What they’ll do with this is unclear. Perhaps it is some sort of user feedback they will use to streamline the category list at a later date.

Invite: Once this is done, you can send invitation emails to your friends by either filling in usernames and passwords for Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, MSN Hotmail, Rediffmail, Indiatimes, Lycos Mail, and AOL Mail or by keying in email addresses separated by commas/semicolons/newlines in a separate editbox.

Features:

- Since there is no active work involved, all it takes to earn money through this is keeping one’s cell phone on and deleting advertisements to free up inbox space once in a while. Users with Symbian-based phones with their slow-as-crap SMS inboxes have my sincerest apologies.

- mGinger try to provide context-based ad placement based on user-selected categories and subcategories, with the advertisements consisting of “offers, vouchers, news and more.” Their website also claims that “some of these offers aren’t available anywhere else, even on their Web site!” Sounds good to me.

- mGinger will also send you these advertisements during the time slot you specify, so you could avoid intermittent beeps from your mobile phone by choosing off-work/off-college hours. I selected 12 AM to 8 AM, the period during which I’m usually snoring my head off, so I can wake up and delete those advertisements that I have accumulated overnight in one go, which seems way more convenient than the check SMS-curse-delete cycle one would otherwise face.

- Since it’s a multi-level scheme, you end up making money even for advertisements you don’t personally receive. Let us say you choose to receive 10 advertisements a day and you refer 10 people who, in turn, refer 10 other people each, all of whom receive 10 advertisements a day. That means you make, in a day, 2 rupees for the advertisements you receive, 10 rupees for the advertisements your referrals receive, and 50 rupees for the 100 people your referrals refer. That brings your daily grand total up to 62 rupees, or 1860 rupees over a 30-day period. I don’t know about you, but that’d just about cover my petrol expenses, and I’m not turning that down.

- Once you have signed up, you can check your earnings on a page called, well, Earning. Once you’ve crossed 300 rupees, you may request that payment be made via check. The website says “your account will get refreshed within 3 days,” so don’t be surprised if you don’t see your earnings piling up instantly.

- Clicking on “support” will only fire up your email client since it is nothing but a mailto: link. That, and the “your account will get refreshed within 3 days” gem I mentioned earlier makes me wonder if it is, in fact, just one guy sitting around somewhere, running the whole show. There is a FAQ page, but I was able to find only one innocuous link to that, and it wasn’t even labeled “FAQ.”

All in all, it looks pretty simple and if you’re willing to ignore your friends screaming “you sold me out!” at you, it could help you earn a small residual income. That’s about all I can glean from their website for now. I’ll try to keep this thing updated as and when I receive more information. Having said that, here’s how you can help me pay for my petrol: sign up here as my referral, kthx.

Edit: In my infinite wisdom, I failed to mention that this offer is, as of today, open to people with Indian SIM cards only.

This is a repost from my old blog, BTW. Quit whining.