Discussion: Passive Earning

Attribution: By LadyofHats (Own work) (Public Domain)

If you’re new to the GPT scene, you’ve heard the term “passive earning” getting thrown around a lot. What does that mean and how does it work? The quick answer is that it refers to earning GPT income passively, with no work from you. Examples of non-passive income would be playing a game, taking a survey or completing an offer. The purpose of this blog post is to discuss the different types of passive earning and how you can take advantage of it.

Note: I understand getting GPT rewards through shopping (via the click-through feature some sites have, like Swagbucks) would qualify as passive, but I don’t get into that type of passive earning for the sake of this blog post.

How Passive Is Passive?

When it comes to passive GPT activities, the most common method involves watching videos. These usually run on a laptop, tablet or phone. Each device can generate anywhere from a few cents to a few dollars per day. In theory, all the user needs to do is start up the videos and let it run for hours on end. Perhaps there’s a “check in” that needs to be done every few hours, but besides that, the user doesn’t need to do anything else while the videos play. However, passive earning usually doesn’t work this well in practice.

What usually happens is that a video (almost always an ad) will freeze up. Maybe you can X it out and the app continues to run, but sometimes you’ll need to restart the app or device. Or, everything seems to work just fine, but you’re either earning very little, like three cents a day or nothing at all.

Theoretical Passive Earning

Most GPT sites and apps have passive earning potential. They don’t actually advertise about passive earning because it would be encouraging users to ignore ads, and that wouldn’t sit well with their advertisers. In most situations, the GPT site or app is designed to allow a user to run a continuously running video to earn rewards. But it doesn’t always work well due to technical issues or because there is a built in limit on passive earning (more on these later).

Actual Passive Earning

Actual passive earning is exactly what it sounds like. An app or website running videos continuously so you can step away from the device and still earn reward, such as SB, points, tokens or whatever the GPT site or app calls it. In my experience very few GPT sites or apps actually allow for actual passive earning. There is always a technical issue that stops the video from playing or the GPT provider somehow limits the passive earning ability.

Limits to Passive Earning

I’ve observed several ways in which passive earning is limited. First, the technical issues. This is almost always because an ad freezes on a phone or tablet (and the app needs to be restarted or the ad must be manually X’ed out) or an ad runs on a laptop, but a software glitch prevents the user from getting credit for it. You might have heard GPT users talking about babysitting an app. They’re referring to frequently checking in on the device to see if an ad needs to be X’ed out, an app restarted or some other maintenance task completed.

Second, if the user engages in too much passive earning, the GPT provider implements a “soft ban” on the user. This may mean the videos are unavailable for watching. For example, on Swagbucks, the Ncraves or video pages are empty or when you click on a video, it says “Oops, the video got away” or something to that effect. I believe that the GPT provider implements a soft ban because the user hasn’t technically violated a term of service, but the GPT provider can’t allow the user to continue earning passively, less the GPT provider upset their advertisers. There’s probably something going on behind the scenes where the GPT provider (or its advertiser) has deemed a particular user as “abusing” the system. I may talk about this more in a future blog post, but it’s pretty complex stuff.

Third, the videos work, but are no longer passive. For example, videos that used to run one after another without any input now require the user to manually click on a button to go to the next video.

Fourth, everything seems to work fine and normal, but despite running the videos for hours on end, the user earns nothing or very, very little.

Fifth, the app will prompt the user to see if they are paying attention. I currently see this in my Perk TV and AppTrailers apps (a window will pop up and ask if you’re still there) and my Super Pop Quiz app (it will give you a CAPTCHA). Luckily, these only come up every few hours, so there’s still passive earning potential, but I wouldn’t call these apps 100% passive, though.

Is There Anything That’s Actually Passive?

When it comes to GPT sites and apps, very few things are actually passive. As I write this, the only thing I consistently run that I would consider close to 100% passive is my CashMagnet app. It’s a mysterious app that I don’t fully understand, but it basically takes over your phone and runs games and visits websites as if someone is remotely controlling your phone. I understand that CashMagnet makes its money from data mining your phone (and possibly somehow monitoring your Internet traffic) and by automatically running apps that users have downloaded. I believe it also runs ads, as well, but I’m not sure how that works. That’s because CashMagnet actually encourages passive earning because when your phone is running the CashMagnet app, you’re not supposed to interrupt it. You can, so don’t think you’re locked out of your device, but if you interrupt the app, it may interrupt your earnings. But even CashMagnet has limits to passive earning. Users must level up to increase the number of hours they can run the CashMagnet app passively. If they don’t level up (by downloading apps or changing settings on their device), the run out of time they can run the app passively and must wait a few hours for the passive timer to build back up. I’ll do a review on this app in the near future, but I’m still figuring out exactly how it works and it’s still got some bugs to work out.

Bottom Line

When it comes to passive earning with GPT sites and apps, there will almost always be a little bit of work involved. Even when something works 100% passively, it won’t last forever and something will always come up to stop the passive earning after a few hours, days or weeks of running.  In fact, the golden age of passive earnings might be over…or at least changing.