**NOTE**: This analysis has now been updated to account for Perk TV's new payment rates. See my other post here.
Want to earn money for doing nothing? Wouldn't we all? Advocates of the Perk TV farm would certainly suggest that it's possible. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite stack up for Australians.
Recently I've been interested in the idea of passive income (you can read my last post about getting started
here) and in my reading and research on the topic, I came across Perk TV. Perk TV is an online streaming video service that is pays its users for watching app videos and movie trailers. Watching videos earns points which can be converted into gift cards or cash in Paypal. So there are people out there who have set up Perk TV farms - a string of devices all running Perk TV 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I did the math though, and it doesn't stack up as something that can be done in Australia, and here's why.
1. Different Rates
Firstly, there are different rates for earning points depending on which country you are from.
- In the US, every 2 videos gets you 4 points.
- In Canada, every 4 videos gets you 4 points.
- In other countries, every 20 videos gets you 4 points.
So from the start, if you are from anywhere except the US, you are at a disadvantage and outside of North America (though there were some people stating the UK was paid at the same rate as Canada) you are at a supreme disadvantage. You'd have to watch 10 times the number of videos to earn the same number of points! Using a VPN to trick the service that your computer is from the US is against their terms of service, and from what I've read, they enforce it pretty strictly. As you can imagine, it is in their interests to do so.
There are a variety of things you can use your points on, but the two main options are gift cards or Paypal credits. Buying a gift card costs you fewer points ($1 = 1,000 points) but if you wanted cold, hard cash the Paypal exchange rate is higher ($1 = 1,400 points). Note that redeeming lower value rewards results in a higher exchange rate, for example a $10 Paypal credit costs 15,000 points, so 1,500 points per dollar. So to get the best value, you need to redeem for higher values rewards. Again, because we're interested in income (though the thought did occur that Amazon gift cards would be great to support my Kindle habits), lets look at redeeming the lowest value Paypal gift card with the best exchange rate - the $25 Paypal credit for 35,000 points.
So in Australia, you earn 1 point per 5 videos. A video's length will vary - the app videos are shorter than the movie trailers, but PerkTV will occasionally switches you over to viewing movie trailers. Taking the most conservative approach, assuming that you only watch movie trailers and that the average length of one of these on the site is about 2 minutes (this figure was sourced from Reddit), then you earn 1 point per 10 minutes of video on average. You want to earn 35,000 points, so you have to watch 350,000 minutes of video, which equates to 243 days of non-stop watching! That's pretty much two-thirds of a year!
2. Internet usage
This is not even taking into account the cost of the other utilities. From my research, most broadband internet plans in the US are unlimited or basically unlimited and rather less expensive than here, so no-one seems to be too worried about exceeding their data usage or having to pay for additional data. However, in Australia most internet plans have a data cap that, once exceeded, will throttle your connection speed or begin charging you for excess usage. It is estimated that running PerkTV typically uses 1.31 GB of data per day (
source) - so about 40 GB per month, which is not an insubstantial proportion of a typical 200 GB or even 500 GB plan. Assuming there are no economies of scale with multiple devices, a five phone Perk TV farm (you are allowed up to 5 devices earning points through Perk TV) would chew through 200 GB in a month.
3. Electricity costs
The other consideration is electricity costs, which becomes an issue given that generating points is harder for users outside of North America (10 times the usage for the same number of points!) and that typically we pay more for electricity here than they do stateside: for instance,
this report from 2012 states that Australians pay 122% (more than double!) more for electricity than our US friends.
One site estimated about 20c in electricity costs per day to power a five phone Perk TV farm in the US. Twenty cents divided by five phones is 4 cents per phone per day. Let's now assume that that 2012 report is still accurate, and that we are still paying double the US for power - we're now at 8 cents per phone per day. Let's also factor in the exchange rate, which as of writing is sitting at 1 US = 1.31 AUD - we're now at 10.48 cents per phone per day in electricity. We then need to run that phone for 243 days to earn our $25 Paypal credit. This equates to $25.47 in electricity costs - so we're in the red on what is probably the smallest fixed cost! And given that electricity prices are increasing, and will most likely continue to increase, this alone makes in unviable from a cost-benefit point of view.
Summary
In summary, a Perk TV farm just isn't viable from an Australian perspective - the rate that you earn points is too slow (perhaps it might be viable if we were on a better deal here), our internet infrastructure, plans and pricing is not well aligned towards it, and the electricity usage costs alone outpace any earnings you would make.
While it probably could be counted as a passive income source, I don't feel it fits in the same category as the monetising of content creation. Passive income in my mind is about providing value to people in the form of information, utilising automation and the power of the internet to leverage your work, while this does not.
Questions? Comments? Feedback? Let me know in the comments, I'm happy to respond.
**NOTE**: This analysis has now been updated to account for Perk TV's new payment rates. See my other post here.
