Rewarder Review

                             No clue why they have McKayla Maroney Face on the login page

URL:  http://www.rewarder.com/

NATURE OF WORK AND PAYMENT

Rewarder essentially has you bid on tasks posted by other users of the site. Most of the tasks involve answering questions, and the work is done "on spec" as whoever posted the questions gets to choose who gets the reward from among the answers submitted.

Aside from answering questions, the only other work I've seen so far is taking surveys which are listed for $1 each. The standard price for a question is $5, but the site also lets people create one free question with every new account, so a lot of bogus questions are posted by trolls who apparently have no intention of coming back other than to laugh at responses.

Rewarder also takes 15% of each reward you win as a fee. It takes $10 on hand to cash out. The site starts you out with a free $2 credit, but it expires in a month if you don't cash out before then. Payout is by Paypal or Amazon.com gift card.

SITE HISTORY / LEGITIMACY

Rewarder is very new, having just been founded in 2010. They are headquartered in San Francisco.

Founder names and contact info are available on Crunchbase. They received $7 million in funding in late 2012, featured in writeups in Wired and the New York Times among other major publications, and have an A- rating from the BBB, so they appear to be stable at least for now.

 INTERNATIONAL ACCESS

I couldn't find any clear information on their site about using it from outside the U.S. , but given that the only payment options are Paypal or an Amazon certificate, it could be an issue in certain countries.


STARTING OUT

It doesn't take any personal information to open an account, and you can bid on any reward right away. You have a "reputation level" that goes up as you win rewards and enter more personal information, but it's not necessary to have it at a certain level to win anything.

The site initially looks promising with a lot of fairly simple questions offering $5 each. Soon you find a lot of questions that look like obvious trolls, however, and/or a bunch that are just so dumb or so obvious it can't be possible someone would put up $5 for them.

I thought Rewarder might be "seeding" fake questions to draw people to the site (maybe using that 7 mil in venture capital they just got), but the stronger possibility is that people create accounts and use the $2 free credit just to ask a troll or intentionally stupid question then leave.

PROBLEMS WITH REWARDER

Troll question or not, every reward that's not a totally obscure subject seems to get a minimum of 40-50 bids. So even if you get a legitimate question, you're still facing a huge amount of competition to answer it. Whatever time you put in doing research and writing stands good odds of going completely uncompensated.

Aside from questions, the only other reliable activity I've seen posted is surveys. Initially this seems interesting, as the surveys offer $1 a pop and there's a number of them available. Once you get into them, however, they turn out to be the longest and most ass-backward survey system I've ever seen. The survey I tried actually kicked me back and forth between THREE different survey sites repeatedly, asking the same questions over and over ... and in the end it unexpectedly demanded an email address and personal information (given to a third-party company, not Rewarder) to get the $1 payment.

FINAL VERDICT: WASTE OF TIME

You're doing your work entirely on spec, and dealing with the double whammy of the question potentially not being legitimate to begin with, and then even if it is you probably will get stiffed anyway because 50 other people are competing with you to answer it. The time you sink into this process could be spent much better being actually compensated at a number of other sites.